Iran rolls out major gas processing project in south
Iran launched a major refinery to process the natural gas extracted from its major gas fields in the south.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ordered the rollout of the Parsian Sepehr Refinery Project on Thursday using a videoconference call from his office in Tehran, Press TV reported.
The massive project has cost over $1 billion in investment drawn from Iran’s sovereign wealth fund and contributions by private shareholders, according to a report by the Iranian Oil Ministry’s news service Shana.
The refinery would operate in two locations near and on the Persian Gulf.
A first facility, located in Mohr region in southern Fars Province, would have a capacity to process 74 million cubic meters of natural gas per day to produce 16 million tons per year of methane, the gas burnt as fuel by the households and industries.
It will also supply some 3.3 million tons per year of other gases through a 63-kilometer pipeline to a second refinery in Assaluyeh where the feedstock will be further processed for supply to various Iranian petrochemical plants.
The projects create 800 new permanent jobs in the two locations, said the Shana report, adding that around 5,000 workers and technical staff had contributed to the construction process since it began in 2015.
During the inauguration ceremony, Rouhani hailed the massive expansion of the downstream section of the Iranian petroleum industry in recent years.
He said the output capacity of the Iranian petrochemical plants would increase by 25 million tons per year as a result of a campaign that began in March 2020 and would finish in August 2021.
Talking in the ceremony, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said that amount of increase in petrochemical output in a matter of less than two years would the highest on record in the history of Iran’s oil industry.