TEHRAN – Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC) has finished the annual overhaul operations for Platform SPD8 of the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf waters, the company’s production and operations director announced.

“With the completion of overhaul operations and the replacement of the three main gas pipelines, production on this platform has resumed,” Shana quoted Alireza Ebadi as saying.

As published on the POGC website, Ebadi noted that after the final studies and reviews on the SPD8 platform in the previous Iranian calendar year (ended on March 19) the required points for improvement were identified in this platform, and those improvements were made during this year’s overhaul operations.

Ebadi said the annual overhaul program of the mentioned platform, which is one of the platforms of phases 6 to 8 of South Pars, was started on August 11 and took 25 days to complete.

According to the official, the overhaul operations for this platform included the calibration of about 50 safety valves on the platform, inspecting seven main platform tanks and eliminating the leakage of defective valves, replacement of three main platform gas pipelines, and performing welding and fit-up operations with more than 90 welding points in different sizes of 32, 12, 8, 6, 4, 2 inches, as well as performing radiographic and complementary tests on the welded areas.

The overhaul of South Pars gas platforms is carried out in the first half of the year due to the reduction in natural gas demand across the country.

These repairs are aimed at monitoring, troubleshooting, and preparing platforms for safe and stable gas production in the second half of the year.

Pars Oil and Gas Company has taken preventive health measures to deal with the outbreak of coronavirus among its employees working on the platforms, and fortunately, there has been no case of this disease so far, according to Ebadi.

South Pars Gas field is currently divided into 24 standard phases in the Iranian side and is estimated to contain a significant amount of natural gas, accounting for about eight percent of the world’s reserves, and approximately 18 billion barrels of condensate.

The mentioned gas field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which, called South Pars, are in Iran’s territorial waters. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, called North Dome, are situated in Qatar’s territorial waters.

EF/MA