Iran plans to prioritize gas exports to neighboring countries and can become a regional gas hub, oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said Tuesday.
Zanganeh told a press conference in Tehran that Iran had global ambitions for its future gas exports, including LNG, but that pipeline exports were not in its immediate line of sight.
"Our priority is first to export gas to neighbors because pipeline exports are not profitable as there are transit fees and pipeline installation costs. We first will try to saturate the regional market and also LNG, but I can't give a figure now for Iran's target share in the global gas market," he said.
"For example Iran can become a gas hub between north and south because, except for Qatar, all the Persian Gulf countries are big gas consumers."
Zanganeh did not elaborate on the concept of a gas hub. However, in July, Amir-Hossein Zamaninia, deputy oil minister for international and commercial affairs, suggested in an interview with Platts that Iran could be a hub if it boosted imports from Turkmenistan beyond the current 30 million cubic meters/day.
"We are thinking about having a pipeline bringing Turkmenistan gas from the north to Chabahar," Zamaninia said at the time, referring to a southern Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman.
Chabahar, he said, would be a strategic point from which to supply gas to India.
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But Zamaninia stressed at the time that these ideas were still "all on paper" and under study rather than "a real practical project."
Zanganeh, meanwhile, said Tuesday that Iran's plans for gas included the export of LNG to Asia and that Tehran would seek foreign investment for its LNG facilities.
"The situation of LNG is good compared with [that of] pipeline [gas]. We plan to use LNG for exports to mainly Asian markets. Our Iran LNG plant which has been stopped under the sanctions pressures but it has progressed 60%. We plan to export its product in the future which is 10 million mt per year. And we definitely seek foreign investment for it, otherwise it can be very risky and we might face investment problems," he said.
Iran will host a heads-of-state summit of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum on November 23 in Tehran.
"We [will] get together in Tehran, and this shows the heads of gas countries have issues to discuss. This is a forum first and then we can gradually enter the market and its policy," Zanganeh said.
"We are not looking to politicize gas, like we were never seeking to politicize oil," he said. "Oil and gas markets [should be] non political and the trade should be carried out normally so that the supply is free and enough. They shouldn't block the supply. What they do now is unfair."
