Oil minister Zanganeh announced a jump of 17 billion barrels in Iran’s oil reserves, which reached 132 billion, with the addition of new discoveries in Yadavaran, southwest of the country. “We now have the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia” oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh announced today in Tehran, citing new discoveries in the southwest of the country. The oil ministry's new figure of 132 billion barrels of proven reserves, a jump of 17 billion barrels, came from discoveries in the Kushk and Hosseinieh oilfields – now classed as a single field and renamed Yadavaran – in the province of Khuzestan.
The minister said exploitable oil at Yadavaran stood at more than three billion barrels, with a potential daily output of between 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd).
He said the new oil field’s development was underway, and figures have been given to Total and Shell and major Chinese, Indian, Spanish and Italian oil companies. He added that the field was open to US oil companies for bidding, but added that the US sanctions bans US oil concerns from participating, and so long as the sanctions remain in place, no figure in Iran’s oil fields will be given to US companies.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) website places Iran’s proven crude reserves at 99.08 billion barrels for 2002, the last year for which figures were given. “That is below even the previous figures given by Iran,” Agence France Presse said in a report from Tehran.
Saudi reserves are estimated at 262.79 billion barrels, with second place going to Iraq with 115 billion barrels, OPEC website says. Iran ranks third, on those figures, with fourth place held by the United Arab Emirates (97.8 billion barrels) and fifth by Kuwait (96.5 billion).
However, Zanganeh pointed to other figures, notably those given in June by British Petroleum (BP), which put Iran in second place with 130.7 billion barrels and Iraq in third place with 115 billion barrels.
He also predicted that by next March, Iranian production would reach 4.3 million bpd. Iran’s quota is 3.744 million bpd and its production and capacity about 3.9 million bpd.
