One of the three key priorities for Iran – along with completing all of the phases on its supergiant South Pars natural gas field and expanding its value-added petrochemicals sector – is to increase the crude oil production and exports from its West Karoun cluster of giant oil fields. The West Karoun fields together contain at least 67 billion barrels of oil in place and, with an average recovery rate currently of only around 4.5 per cent (compared to over 50 percent at similar oil fields in Saudi Arabia), the potential to dramatically increase Iran’s crude oil revenues is enormous. With China remaining a willing buyer for all crude oil that Iran wants to sell it, Tehran last week announced a swathe of initiatives aimed at completing the production-transportation-export chain for West Karoun oil flows. To begin with, the first phase of the oil-transfer chain of the West Karoun […]