Iran confident about strategic fuel as Trump deadline looms
Iran looks con¿dently to the future when the operation of a new re¿nery propels the country to its long-held goal of fuel self-suf¿ciency.
The inauguration of the second phase of Persian Gulf Star Re¿nery in Bandar Abbas comes as the specter of new US sanctions on Iran looms, with US President Donald Trump threatening to pull out of an international nuclear deal, wrote Press TV.
The US and Europeans made gasoline sanctions a central part of their arm-twisting of Iran in 2011 over the country’s nuclear program. Iran was the Persian Gulf region’s biggest gasoline buyer before world powers imposed the sanctions.
When those sanctions were lifted, the country needed to import about 20 percent more gasoline to meet pent-up demand in the ¿rst year, creating a market for some $1 billion in fuel sales from abroad.
According to ¿gures from the Joint Organizations Data Initiative, Iran’s gasoline imports slumped to almost zero in 2012 from more than 100,000 barrels a day before 2010, putting the country under a lot of strain.
Now, the country is well placed to weather those pressures if the US leader chooses to chuck the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal is of¿cially called.
That is thanks to Iran’s re¿neries expansion plans which are bearing fruit to make more fuel and putting the country on the threshold of producing a gasoline surplus.
Iran has been building a 360,000-barrel-a-day re¿nery called Persian Gulf Star that National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) says will make it a net exporter of gasoline.
It is the biggest condensate refining facility in the Middle East which converts light crude into gasoline and naphtha.
The Àagship prime quality gasoline production project is now producing as much as 12 million liters of the strategic fuel every day, with the new phase expected to add another 10 million liters of capacity and raise Iran’s overall gasoline production to 90 million liters a day.
The ¿nal production capacity of the project is 36 million liters per day of ‘Euro 5’ gasoline.
Other daily products of the project after completion would be four million liters of lique¿ed petroleum gas and three million liters of jet fuel.
The new phase will double the re¿nery’s capacity to 240,000 barrels per day, with another 120,000 barrels of capacity remaining to be built in the third phase and necessary modi¿cations to be made to meet its highest fuel-quality speci¿cations known as Euro 5.