NCRI – The production and export of crude oil in Iran faces the imminent danger of coming to a halt.
There are nearly 2,000 active oil wells in Iran today. More than 80 percent of the oil production takes place in fields that are nearing their peak and where the oil pressure is falling resulting in lower output. That is why enhanced oil recovery methods such as gas injection have become crucially important.
However, as a result of lack of investment and absence of the required technology, the Iranian regime has resorted to low-cost oil recovery methods which stand to waste a huge part of the country’s oil reserves. According to the spokesman of the Majlis (Parliament) Energy Committee, nearly 400,000 barrels per day are produced without enhanced oil recovery methods.
The figures provided by Emad Hosseini are believed to be highly conservative with the real estimates thought to be somewhere around 800,000 barrels per day.
During the 1970s, immediately before the 1979 revolution, each well in Iran produced 18,000 barrels of oil per day. Currently, that number has been reduced to 2,000. If this trend of low-cost extraction of oil and disregard for the rate of output of aging wells continues, export of crude oil by Iran will come to a halt within the next six to seven years and in less than a decade Iran will turn into a crude oil importer.
This would have happened much sooner in the past couple of years had the South Pars gas fields not been discovered.
In the absence of enhanced oil recovery methods such as gas injection, which require advanced technology and huge investments, it will no longer be possible to extract oil from oil fields in Iran. Once the oil pressure drops and production halts, it will no longer be possible to extract the remaining oil, which means that the resources will be wasted.
The current low-cost and highly irresponsible methods used in Iran to extract oil are extremely harmful to the vast oil reserves of the country and if continued will squander and destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of the country’s untapped wealth.
The Iranian regime’s methods have also considerably lowered production. Currently, production at the Maroun oil field, which used to be around 920,000 barrels per day, has been reduced more than half to 400,000 barrels per day. Similar trends are seen at the Ahvaz oil field which in the past was responsible for 25 percent of the oil production in the country.
