TEHRAN Director of the operations zone of South Pars Gas Field Mohammad-Ali Yousefian said here on Saturday that contracts have been signed for development of the phases 9 and 10 of South Pars Gas Field and executive operations on the projects are soon to start.

Yousefian told IRNA on Saturday that the phases 11 and 12 are in the stage of tendering and preparations are being made to select contractor for the phases 13 and 14.

He said based on estimates, $14.5 billion in hard currency is needed for implementation of the phase 14 of the project. He added that $8 billion out of the total sum has been invested in the phases I through 4 of the project.

The official said implementation of the first eight phases of the project has so far created 18,000 jobs directly and 25,000 ones indirectly.

He said that implementation of the first 14 phases will create 50,000 jobs in combination.

He added that executive operations on the first refining unit of the phases 2 and 3 of south pars gas field have been completed by totalfinaelf, gazprom and petronas companies to operate with the capacity of 500 million cubic feet of gas, 20,000 barrels of gas consendates and 100,000 tons of sulfur per day.

He said the gas condensate output of the unit are now being stored and it will soon be exported from the unit.

Yousefian said the first phase of the project, that is now being implemented by petropars, has made about a 78 percent physical progress and is to become operational in october on schedule.

Two refining units, with the daily capacity of one billion cubic feet of gas, 40,000 barrles of gas condensates and 200,000 tons of sulfur, are to be built in this phase, he added.

The source said 60 percent of engineering services and operations on the first phase are done by iranian specialists. he added that to this end, a 32-inch pipeline has been laid on an 150 kilometers stretch of land for transfer of energy from the offshore to the onshore destinations.

Meanwhile, Iran will reap 11 billion dollars annually from gas sales once its biggest gas development project, known as South Pars, in southern Assaluyeh in the Bushehr Province becomes complete, Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said here Saturday.

The project includes development of the offshore gas field, accounting for 10 percent of the world's and 60 percent of Iran's total gas reserves, which the country shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf.

Iran is currently developing the huge field, said to contain 17 trillion cubic meters of sour gas on top of gas and oil condensates, in eight phases.

Zanganeh said that the Islamic Republic, which started work on the field six years behind qatar in 1998, has spent eight billion dollars so far on its development.

Iran's share from the field is estimated to value 700 billion dollars, he said during a tour, headed by the Chairman of the Arbitrative Expediency Council, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, of the Bushehr Province.

"Once exploitation of gas starts from the South Pars project, 13,000 billion cubic meters of gas, beside 17 billion barrels of gas condensates, will be produced annually," the Iranian oil minister further said.

Phases two and three of the project are carried out by French total with a 2.12 billion dollars investment with the partnership of Malaysian Petronas and Russian gazprom. They were expected to come on stream in January, but the plan was delayed because of yet unspecified reasons.

Iran is further mulling to tender development of several other phases. Zanganeh in January said that the project could be expanded to 30 phases.

The investments are made in buyback deals when an investor recoups its spending as well as the profit involved through output sales.