Baku, Azerbaijan, May 17
By Dalga Khatinoglu – Trend:
Iran exported 290,000 barrels per day of oil products during the last fiscal year (ended on March 20), but for the current fiscal year, it plans to increase the volume to 550-600 thousand barrels per day, Managing Director of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company (NIOPDC) Mansour Riyahi said.
In the first half of the last fiscal year, Iranian officials had put the oil products export at about 400,000 b/d.
Riyahi said that cutting Turkmen gas deliveries to Iran in January 1, 2016 as well as cutting 60 million cubic meters per day of gas output (in South Pars for several weeks) led to increasing domestic gas oil and fuel oil demand in last winter and pushed the average oil product exports down, Mehr reported.
Turkmenistan cut gas flow to Iran at the beginning of 2017 due to its long-delayed $2 billion debts. Turkmenistan’s gas export volume to Iran was 9 bcm in 2015.
Iran has increased gas supply to power plants during the last several years and decreased fuel oil and gas oil consumption in this sector from 26 billion liters in 2012 to about 11 bcm in 2016, which led to increasing Iran’s oil products export capacity.
The statistics of Iranian Energy Ministry indicate that Iran only increased gas supply to power sector by 7 percent (to 61 bcm), while it should have delivered 65 bcm during the last fiscal year, based on a plan.
However, Iran’s gas supply to power plants has increased by 19.2 percent during the first five weeks of the current fiscal year (March 21 to April 27).
According to the latest weekly report of Iran’s Energy Ministry, some 5.992 billion cubic meters of gas was supplied to the country’s power plants, while gas oil and fuel oil deliveries decreased by 36.3 percent and 75.8 percent to 51 million and 69 million liters respectively.
