The work on South Pars facilities, part of the world’s biggest gas field, has led to a big drop in fuel oil exports since mid-July as the lack of gas led Iranian power plants to burn more oil instead, they said.
The five-stage rolling maintenance program, running at South Pars since June, should be completed at the end of next month, an industry source with knowledge of the plans said.
“South Pars has an outage going on,” another industry source said.
“They still maintain that October will be back to normal.”
The offshore South Pars field contains about half of Iran’s estimated 29.60 trillion cubic meters of reserves, according to the data from BP, the world’s second largest after Russia.
US-led international sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program have hindered the development of its gas sector and a third source said the outage was partly because of difficulties getting replacement parts due to sanctions.
Iranian officials contacted by Reuters declined to comment.
The South Pars reservoir is shared by Iran and Qatar.
Iran’s lower fuel oil exports have tightened fuel oil supplies in Singapore and Fujairah. Fuel oil flows to East Asia have also been affected.
The National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC) has told Asian buyers that September-loading exports will be limited.
“The market is still tight,” said a Middle-East based fuel oil trader. “Although we’re hearing that they are trying to force out one Bandar Abbas cargo export or so to utilize the market strength.”
Regular buyers as well as Gulf-based traders were unsure if the cut in exports would last beyond September, as NIOC has not given any indication.
“We were told by NIOC that this situation was going to last until the end of September and then come back to normal afterwards,” another fuel oil trader said.
