Iran announces contracts worth $13 billion to boost its production

Iran announces contracts worth billion to boost its production

2024-03-17 15:45:00

13 billion dollars. This is the value of the new contracts announced by the Iranian government this Sunday to increase its oil production. The ambition of these projects, which concern six fields in the south and southwest of the country, is to increase oil production “ of nearly 400,000 barrels” per day, said the minister responsible for oil, Javad Owji. The latter recently set the country’s production at four million barrels/day in March 2025, the end of the next year of the Persian calendar, the solar calendar used in particular in Iran and Afghanistan.

The ministry clarified that these contracts were “ the most important in a decade », a period during which the sector suffered from underinvestment. This program should thus increase oil revenues by “ 15 billion dollars per year”, he added during the signing ceremony organized in Tehran, on the day of the 73rd anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry in 1951.

Especially since many unknowns loom over the evolution of the economy which, despite the country’s enormous oil and gas reserves, remains weakened by the severe sanctions imposed by the United States. What’s more, tensions linked to the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip have added to uncertainties, particularly on the rate of the national currency, the rial, which has been under pressure in recent weeks.

An attack by Israel once morest Iran: the fear of a new energy crisis

Large oil fields

To implement these contracts, Iran does not count “ not on foreign companies or financing », according to Javad Owji. One of the main contracts signed on Sunday concerns the Azadegan field, in the Khuzestan province (southwest), where the country’s main deposits are located. The Iranian government recently unveiled a $20 billion program for the development, by four national companies, of the world’s largest natural gas field, South Pars, located in the Persian Gulf and straddling the waters territorial territories of Iran and Qatar.

As a reminder, Iran, a member of OPEC, holds the third largest oil reserves and the second largest gas reserves, according to statistics from the American Energy Agency. Despite this abundance, its crude production fell in 2020 to its lowest level in three decades due to severe international sanctions imposed following the unilateral withdrawal in 2018 of the United States from the nuclear agreement, concluded three years ago. previously and providing for limitations on the Iranian nuclear program. Sanctions which had notably put in place an embargo on petroleum products. Foreign multinationals then left Iran.

But crude oil production has recently started to rise once more in recent months, driven by exports to China.

New economic sanctions

For its part, the American government took new economic and legal sanctions once morest Iran at the beginning of February.

In detail, the Minister of Justice Merrik Garland and the federal prosecutor for the jurisdiction of Manhattan in New York, Damian Williams, announced prosecutions for “ terrorism, sanctions evasion, fraud and money laundering once morest seven figures in an oil laundering network orchestrated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a foreign terrorist organization, and its Quds Force », his elite unit.

As a reminder, the Revolutionary Guards constitute the ideological army of the Tehran regime.

American justice notably accused, in a press release, Iranian official officials and Turkish executives of an Ankara energy group of “ laundering and selling Iranian oil to buyers linked to China, Russia and Syria to finance the Quds Force, supporting Iran’s terrorism “. The federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan also announced the ” seizure of $108 million that Revolutionary Guard companies were trying to launder through accounts of American financial institutions ».

« Iran uses its black market oil sales channels to finance its criminal activities, such as its support for the Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, Hezbollah and other affiliated terrorist groups. », Declared Minister Garland in the press release.