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IRAN: There will be oil, and lots of it

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Iran is reporting huge new discoveries of oil that contain ‘billions’ of barrels of reserves, state radio quoted the managing director of the country’s National Oil Co. as saying today.

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Seyfollah Jashnsaz said Iran has discovered seven new oil fields in unspecified locations around the country.

‘Billions of barrels of oil will be added to the country’s existing oil reserves,’ he said in comments broadcast on state radio.

According to Jashnsaz, just one of these oil fields has 9 billion barrels of oil.

‘Even if we make calculations based on the minimum 12% recovery rate,’ he said, ‘it means that 1 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from this field alone.’

He added that further details of the find will be announced by the country’s minister of oil in coming days.

Iran already has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, behind first-place Saudi Arabia and Canada. It recently added that its reserves had grown to 138 billion barrels from 90 billion barrels, thanks to reserves discovered over the last three years.

But Iran’s problem has never been finding oil and gas reserves, but drawing them out of the earth and seabed and shipping them off for export.

On Saturday, Iran’s deputy oil minister admitted that the country has been too slow in developing Persian Gulf gas fields compared to Qatar, which draws natural gas from the same reserves.
Iran produces only 10 billion cubic feet of gas per day from the South Pars field, compared to 12.2 billion cubic feet produced by tiny Qatar, which shares the field, said Akbar Torkan.

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The South Pars field contains an estimated 46.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, about 8% of the world’s proven reserves.

Iran blames United Nations and U.S. restrictions on doing business with Iran for its lackluster production.

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: The Lavan oil refinery at Lavan Island off the south coast of Iran. Credit: Behrouz Mehri / AFP / Getty Images

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