Iran is targeting Asia’s growing demand for refined oil products with a $2.8 billion project to add 480,000 barrels a day of processing capacity at the Siraf refinery on the Persian Gulf coast.

OPEC’s fifth-biggest crude producer plans to process condensate, a light oil extracted along with natural gas, into exportable products at the new refining units, Ali-Reza Sadegh-Abadi, managing director of Siraf Refineries Infrastructure Co., said in an interview in Tehran. The project is to be completed in three years, he said.

Private Iranian companies will use their own funds to build eight processing plants, each with a capacity of 60,000 barrels a day, said Sadegh-Abadi, who is coordinating the project. The Siraf complex is in the coastal city of Assaluyeh near the South Pars offshore gas field.

Iran is boosting gas output from South Pars to meet a growing domestic need for fuel. Sales of condensate from South Pars supplement Iran’s crude oil exports, which are constrained by international sanctions. Condensate exports face no such constraints so long as they go to buyers permitted under U.S. sanctions to purchase Iranian crude. Sales of condensate doubled last year to about 200,000 barrels a day and contributed to total Iranian oil shipments in April of about 1.3 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency.


Iran is negotiating with six world powers to end a dispute over its nuclear program with an accord that would remove the curbs on its oil and financial industries. The country may be able to increase crude supplies by as much as 400,000 barrels a day in the next 12 months, if the two sides reach an agreement, Michael Lewis, global head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank, said Wednesday at a briefing in Singapore.

“In the long term, Iran wants to move more into selling refined products and having joint-venture refineries abroad,” Olivier Jakob, managing director of Zug, Switzerland based Petromatrix GmbH, said by phone Tuesday. “It’s strategic for them.” Diversifying exports beyond crude and into higher-value refined products will help Iran boost revenue, and owning geographically dispersed assets would help shield it from potential sanctions in the future, he said.


The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is to meet June 5 to assess its production amid a global supply glut. OPEC should trim “at least 5 percent” from its output target of 30 million barrels a day, Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said at a news conference in Tehran in April.

The country plans eventually to reduce exports of condensate to zero and use all of it in local refineries, Sadegh-Abadi said. As condensate production rises to more than 1 million barrels a day in the next few years, Iran will produce more naphtha for export to chemical-makers in Asia, he said.

“Around 60 percent of Siraf’s gas condensate will be turned into naphtha, which is the basis for the production of plastic-based products,” Sadegh-Abadi said. Consumption of those products “is growing and directly linked to improvement in economic conditions in most countries,” he said.

Siraf will have capacity to produce about 270,000 barrels a day of naphtha, 140,000 of gasoil, 30,000 of liquefied petroleum gas and 40,000 of kerosene, Sadegh-Abadi said.
(Source: Bloomberg)