Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 1/Trend A. Qurbanova, D.Khatinoglu/
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad instructed the Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Mahmoud Bahmani to open a $5 billion line of credit abroad to help development of oil and gas projects, Mehr News Agency reported .
Earlier, Iranian Oil Minster Rostam Ghasemi has offered opening line of credit for the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to develop projects by assigning $5 billion of Iran's inventories abroad.
Thus, $4.3 billion of this sum w ill be assigned to development of South Pars project and the rest to other oil projects.
Iran , which has been affected by economic sanctions, says there is a need to attract foreign investments to develop oil and gas project, especially the South Pars oil and gas field which is shared with Qatar and holds about a half of Iran's gas reserves.
Iran has operated Phases 1 to 10 , while Phases 15 and 16 w ill be operational until the end of this autumn.
Iran is developing 13 phases of South Pars (Phases 10 to 23) contemporarily. Iran invested $7.6 billion (760,000 billion rials) in South Pars and it is planned to invest further $16.5 billion in this project by the end of this solar year (March 21, 2012).
So far, over $48 billion has been invested in the Pars Oil and Gas Company projects
The world's largest oil and gas field South Pars is developed jointly by Iran and Qatar. Iran is expected to produce up to $130 billion in revenues annually.
The Iranian share, which was divided into 28 phases, has about 14 trillion cubic meters of gas (about 8 percent of total world reserves) and more than 18 billion barrels of liquefied natural gas resources.