TEHRAN (Iran News) – The outbreak of the coronavirus did not halt Iran’s oil production for even one day, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said on Tuesday.
Zanganeh noted that since the beginning of the outbreak, his ministry made serious efforts to prevent any stoppage in oil production while protecting the workforce, Shana reported.
“The Oil Ministry was one of the first bodies to take the lead due to the sensitivity and impossibility of shutting down oil activities,” he said.
“If oil and gas are not produced, electricity and water will not be produced,” Zanganeh stressed.
Zanganeh had previously announced that the Oil Ministry’s measures were taken in the four phases of prevention, readiness, confrontation, and returning to normal conditions.
Mentioning the drastic fall in global oil prices and US sanctions along with the pandemic, Zanganeh noted that the oil industry is going through hard times, but the people are shouldering the real burden.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said in July that Iran’s revenues from total crude oil exports and oil products in 2019 was just over $19 billion, less than a third of the previous year.
According to the organization’s annual report, Iran’s income from selling oil and oil products amounted to 60.5 billion in 2018, while it was $110 billion in 2011.
Iran’s average daily crude oil exports last year were 651,000 barrels per day, of which about 60,000 barrels went to Turkey and the rest to Asia, it said.
Iran’s oil industry is at the forefront of an economic war with the United States which has pledged to bring Tehran’s crude exports down to zero. The Islamic Republic exported around one million bpd until May 2019, when the United States tightened its sanctions, banning all oil exports from Iran.
The Iranian economy has been carrying on at a relatively steady clip after a period of turmoil when the Trump administration unleashed its most ferocious economic attack on the country in November 2018, with a pledge to sink Iran’s oil exports to zero.
- source : Iran Daily
