TEHRAN, 15 July 2003 — Iran has made a major new oil find containing estimated reserves of more than 38 billion barrels, making it one of the world’s biggest undeveloped fields, a senior oil official was quoted as saying yesterday.
Abolhasan Khamoushi, general director of Iran’s Oil Development and Engineering Company, told the Kayhan evening newspaper that the find, combining three neighboring oil fields, had been discovered close to the southern port city of Bushehr.
An Oil Ministry spokeswoman confirmed to Reuters the accuracy of the report but could give no further details.
Khamoushi said preliminary studies indicated that the Ferdows field contained 30.6 billion barrels, the Mound field 6.63 billion and the Zagheh field 1.3 billion.
“The exact capacity will be announced shortly,” Kayhan quoted Khamoushi as saying. “Producing oil from these heavy crude fields needs special technology and heavy investment,” he added.
The crude is of high density, making it less valuable on world markets than most of Iran’s 90 billion barrels of proven reserves.
Commercially recoverable reserves are certain to prove much less than the 38 billion barrels in place, but the find could still rival the world’s two other leading undeveloped fields.
Manouchehr Takin, an Iranian oil expert at the Center for Global Energy Studies said he thought the crude would be a likely candidate for foreign investment given the high cost of production, and added the discovery would be significant in the long term for Iran’s oil wealth. “It is a huge quantity. With heavy oil you could get up 10-20 percent of this which could be up to five to even 10 billion barrels,” he told Reuters.
