Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh told a press conference in Tehran today that his ministry is planning to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe rather than pumping gas via pipelines.
“LNG has a considerable advantage as it can be exported to the most remote parts of the world, but exporting gas via pipelines is limited,” Zanganeh was reported as saying by the Fars News Agency. “LNG is Iran’s policy for far-reaching markets; export of pipelined gas has a number of problems and in addition to pipe (laying) for long distances, huge investments also need to be made for transit…”
Zaganeh said Iran’s building an LNG plant with capacity of 10 million tonnes a year. Iran has natural gas reserves of 33trn cubic metres and plans to raise annual output to 1.3bn cubic metres by the end of the 6th five-year development plan in 2021.