Iran has a capacity to increase oil production to even 5.5-6 million barrels per day (mb/d), but not under the current situations, Fereydoun Barkeshli, former general manager at National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) in OPEC and international affairs, told Trend April 21.Iran's oil output plunged by more than one million barrels to 2.8 mb/d during a 3-year sanctions, imposed by western countries in 2012. Iran had to shut down some fields, but resumed the output to around 3.3 mb/d in March, three months after lifting sanctions.
Tehran says it would increase this figure to the pre-sanctions level, but most of international organization, including the Energy Information Administration believes that the country can add only around 0.5 mb/d to its output in 2016 due to the delays in developing new fields and technical problems for resuming output from old fields.
About 80 percent of Iran's active fields are in their second half-life and their production decrease by 8-13 percent annually. For now Iran re-injects about 93 million cubic meters per day (mcm/d) to maintain the output level, but the figure should have been three times more than this level.
Barkeshli says that Iran needs a lot of gas injection to brown fields (active oil fields). "Currently oil and gas must move hand in hand in order to make raising crude oil production more sustainable and meaningful".
For now, Iran has increased oil exports by 750,000 b/d to 1.7 mb/d since January mostly thanking to the 30-50 million barrels of stored oil on water, but the figure is more much than the production growth. Keeping exports sustainable incoming months or increasing that to the pre-sanctions level (2.2mb/d) is not possible with the current output.