Tehran will in the coming months launch a major international tender inviting oil giants to bid for 17 contracts to develop oil and gas reserves in southern Iran, the Jomhuri-Eslami paper said Tuesday.
Hojatollah Qanimifard, the head of the Iranian oil ministry's international department, was quoted as saying that the contracts would be signed according to the customary "buy-back" formula, which means that the foreign company recoups its investment and gets its profit from a share of production.
The bids will cover the oil and gas fields of Tanghestan, Tshemeh-Khosh, Dehloran and Sarvestan, as well as phases 9, 10 and 11 of the giant South Pars field and Sirri C and Sirri D, Qanimifard said without revealing the value of the projects.
Tehran is under a unilateral US embargo which provides for measures against companies investing more than 40 million dollars in Iran's oil industry.
In September, Iran invited bids for the development of the last zones in the South Pars gas project, considered to be the biggest field in the world.
Launched by French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, development of the first three zones is already under way. The cost of the first eight zones is put at $4.3 billion.
Iran has the world's second largest gas reserves after Russia, and is the second largest oil producer in OPEC after Saudi Arabia.
It is seeking to raise its crude output to five million barrels a day in the coming years, which according to experts necessitates significant foreign investment.—AFP.
©--Agence France Presse 2001.
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
