Iran anticipates Khesht kick-off in the next year

The Iranian Central Oil Fields Co. (ICOFC) announced last week that the first phase of production at the Khesht oilfield on the border of Iran’s Fars and Bushehr provinces will be launched by the end of September. ICOFC is a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Co. (NIOC).

Speaking to official oil and gas media outlet Shana, Ramin Hatami, the company’s managing director, said that production would reach 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) during the first half of the upcoming Iranian calendar year, which begins in March.

Hatami said: “The early phase of the field will be operational in the first half of next year with the launch of three wells, and the produced oil will be sent to Nargesi Centre via a 10-inch [254-mm] pipeline.” He added that a total of five wells would be required to complete the field’s development.

Khesht is being developed by ICOFC subsidiary South Zagros Oil and Gas Production Co., a company based in Shiraz.

Meanwhile, the ICOFC website lists achieving 30,000 bpd of output at Khesht and development of “transmission to Gonaveh manifold for export” as one of the company’s active projects.

Qeshm Oil and Energy Industries Development Co. (OEID) previously carried out extensive contracting work at Khesht, including shooting 2D and 3D seismic, studies for improved and enhanced oil recovery (IOR/EOR), well work-overs and the construction of pipelines connecting the field to the Nargesi central processing facility (CPF) and the Shiraz refinery. This also included work to enable the expansion of production at the Sarvestan and Saadatabad oilfields to 30,000 bpd.

During a recent visit to Khesht, the head of the Iranian Parliament’s Energy Committee, Fereydoun Abbasi, said that the project’s had reached 90% completion, adding that once the upstream development had been finalised, plans are in place to construct a small refinery to convert the field’s output into refined products for local consumption.

Gas storage

In related news, ICOFC also announced last week that gas reproduction capacity from its Sarajeh underground gas storage (UGS) facility near Qom had risen by 17% since March 2020 compared to the previous Iranian calendar year.

The company’s production director, Ahmad Rajabi, said that 1.01bn cubic metres of gas has been reproduced from storage in the last 11 months.

Sarajeh is one of Iran’s two main gas storage facilities, the other being Shourijeh in the north-eastern province of Khorasan Razavi, 124 km south of Tehran. In mid-2020, the National Iranian South Oil Co. (NISOC) said that combined reproduction from the two sites had increased by 33% during the March 2019-March 2020 calendar year compared to the previous year.

As Iran nears completion of the final offshore and onshore phases of the supergiant South Pars gas field, Iran’s portion of the world’s largest gas deposit, Tehran has prioritised the expansion of its gas storage network.

Production from the 23 operational offshore phases was reported by Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh in September to have reached 700mn cubic metres per day, up from 280 mcm per day in 2013.