TEHRAN: Iran has increased its oil output significantly during the current fiscal year, started March 20, 2017, the country’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said. Iran’s crude oil and gas condensate output has increased by 165,000 barrels per day during the first ten months of the current fiscal year (March 20-Jan. 21), Zanganeh told reporters Feb. 4. Gas condensate is ultra light oil, which the Islamic Republic mainly extracts from South Pars gas field and shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf. The country exports almost all volume of condensate output from the field. Zanganeh said also that Iran’s oil export has also witnessed a rise by 60,000 barrels per day in the 10-month period. Iran’s oil export and output has increased by more than one million barrels per day, after removal of international sanctions in 2016, the minister noted. According to the Oil Ministry data, Iran exported about 777 million barrels of crude oil and 180 million barrels of condensate in 2017, averaging 2.62 million barrels a day (2.1 mbpd of crude and 490,000 bpd of condensate). Asian countries, including China, India, South Korea and Japan were main destination of the exports with some 62 percent share, meanwhile about 38 percent of the exports went to European markets. Turkey, Italy, the UK, Hungary and the Netherlands were among the Islamic Republic’s crude oil customers in Europe. Zanganeh further touched upon the increasing of production level in West Karoun oil fields, which is shared with Iraq and is a priority for the ministry. He said that the overall output of the fields currently stands at about 305,000 barrels per day. West Karoun oil fields’ output has increased by 145,000 barrels per day during the current fiscal year, the minister added.
The five fields in West Karoun Block, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, hold 66.7 billion barrels of in-situ oil reserves, sharing 9.5 percent of the country’s total in-situ oil and gas condensate reserves.
