Iran oil conference in London postponed

A conference planned for December in London to unveil new Iranian oil contracts has been postponed to February 2016, National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) reported on Saturday.

According to NIOC, its Managing Director Rokneddin Javadi said earlier in September that the new contracts would be unveiled first at a Tehran conference most probably in early November.

The supplementary conference will be held one or two months later most probably in London,” NIOC has quoted him as saying.

The London conference is now being delayed for the fourth time as Iran is putting the finishing touches on the new contracts model.

As said by NIOC, officials have been touting the new contracts, hoping to attract foreign investment to the country’s vast oil and gas sector after the removal of sanctions.

The new model, called the Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC), will be unveiled for a combination of brown and green fields as well as exploration blocks up for development in a series of projects worth $185 billion.

IPC is replacing buyback deals which required the host government to pay the contractor an agreed price for all volumes of hydrocarbons it produced.

Under the IPC, the NIOC will set up joint ventures for crude oil and gas production with international companies which will be paid with a share of the output.

Iran holds the first largest natural gas reserves and fourth largest oil reserves in the world.

The South Pars oil layer lies within the world’s largest gas field and is estimated to hold 7 billion barrels of oil in reserves.

According to the NIOC, Petroleum Ministry officials have said that up to 35,000 barrels per day of oil could be recovered from the layer in the first phase.

The North Pars field in the Persian Gulf is estimated to hold 57.1 trillion cubic feet of sour gas. Golshan holds more than 50 trillion cubic feet of gas and is predicted to yield 2 billion cubic feet after development. They are all offshore fields.

The country’s national oil company also said that international companies are waiting Iran’s presentation of oil development projects as the race tightens for new business opportunities in the country.

Iranian officials have said preliminary negotiations have started with France’s Total and Italy’s Eni as well as Italian oil and gas industry contractor Saipem for boosting recovery from offshore oilfields.

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