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Several more modern pumps are to be installed at various wells of the field by the end of the current Persian year (March 20, 2019).
The Yaran fields have an estimated 2bn barrels of oil reserves, according to initial findings. Officials say North Yaran may manage 50,000 b/d to 60,000 b/d at full capacity, around half what was originally anticipated.
Iraq is already extracting some 200,000 b/d from its share of the South Yaran field.
Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh met with Russian counterpart Alexander Novak in Moscow on July 23 to rally support for the country’s ailing oil sector, official Iranian energy news agency SHANA reported. Zanganeh’s visit came 10 days after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s advisor Ali Akbar Velayati stated that Russia had offered Iran $50bn in investment to stave off attempts by the US to shut down Tehran’s oil industry. The Trump administration is intent on strangling Iran’s economy with sanctions to the point that the Iranians will be forced to renegotiate their role in Middle East affairs. A possible worry for Iran is that US President Trump may have asked for concessions on Russia’s Iran policy during his closed door talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki summit last week. Tehran and Moscow have been on relatively good terms in recent times but there is naturally some anxiety that Putin may have given a certain amount of ground on Iran in return for policy rewards promised by Trump. Officially Zanganeh and Novak discussed the implementation of a roadmap for Russian-Iranian cooperation in the energy sector. There is already some such cooperation at some small oil fields in southern Iran. The potential for Russian companies to participate in Iranian hydrocarbon exploration and production projects and the implementation of gas infrastructure projects, and cooperation in multilateral formats through OPEC, were matters likely to have been on the agenda. But Russia would have to ignore US sanctions aimed at Iran in order to make commitments in these areas.
9.1.2 Automotive sector news
Iran’s automotive assemblers saw output fall in the third Iranian month of Khordad (ended June 21) to 108,334 units, a decline of 19.6% y/y.
The decrease can be attributed to the collapse of the Iranian rial (IRR) and the consequent difficulties producers and assemblers have had in sourcing metal and imported auto parts. The year-on-year fall is the first such decline suffered by Iran’s car assemblers in recent years and also indicates that the government and importers did not get a handle on the changing economic landscape driven by Washington’s squeezing of Iran’s economy.
Raw material costs, including those of stainless steel and aluminium used in the production of parts for cars, have moved up by an average 40% in the past three months. Several Chinese producers of low-cost vehicles for the Iranian market have come unstuck in recent weeks, failing to pay their parent companies in China due to the nosedive of the IRR’s value.
President Hassan Rouhani has called on the country’s judiciary to stop grey imports of vehicles and to tackle corruption in the auto sector, Iran Front Page (IFP) reported on July 14. Premium vehicles, including luxury marques like BMW and Lexus, are subject to the ban on imports on listed products announced earlier this month to stem the depletion of the country’s stocks of foreign exchange amid its new economic difficulties.
However, demand remains strong for the cars among certain wealthy groups in
39 IRAN Country Report August 2018 www.intellinews.com