TEHRAN (Iran News) – Iran officially started the extraction of natural gas extracting gas from an offshore field in the Persian Gulf to add some 14.2 million cubic meters (mcm) a day to its current output of more than 800 mcm.

An Oil Ministry contractor said on Thursday that extraction of natural gas had started overnight in the third drilling rig at Phase 14 of South Pars, the largest gas field in the world which is shared between Iran and Qatar, Press TV reported.

Mohammad-Mehdi Tavasolipour said production from the 14B drilling rig would reach a full capacity of 14.2 mcm within the next few days, adding that the gas produced in the field will be transferred through a five-kilometer pipeline to a refinery in the adjacent Phase 12 of South Pars.

“As the cold season draws near and the country needs winter fuel, the 14B rig came on line based on a pre-existing schedule to meet a part of the growing demand for gas,” said the contractor.

The start of production at the new rig in the South Pars would bring Iran’s output from the offshore section of the giant gas field to 42 mcm (1.5 billion cubic feet) a day. Total production from South Pars is planned to reach 650 mcm by March as Iran seeks to completely outdo Qatar in the shared gas field.

It comes nearly six months after Iran successfully installed the drilling rig, a super-size structure hailed at the time as a sign of Iran’s capability to counter the harsh US sanctions on the country’s energy sector.

Additional raw materials that would be obtained from gas production at the rig include some 20,000 barrels per day of condensates, some 100,000 tons a day of sulfur, 250,000 tons per year of liquefied petroleum gas and a similar amount of ethane, said Tavasolipour.

The National Iranian Oil Company’s head of Exploration, Saleh Hendi, said in October that his company had discovered a new deposit after a year of continuous exploration in southern Iran.

Hendi added that the gas was struck at a depth of 3,900 meters and that the deposit that was tapped contained enough energy to provide power to the whole of Tehran, which has a population of 12 million, over a period of 16 years.

The report comes on the heels of news that China’s CNPC had pulled out from the South Pars Phase 11 project, which was supposed to be led by French Total.

Total left Iran last year after US sanctions snapped back, leaving CNPC with the opportunity to gain a majority in the project. According to Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, however, this did not happen, and the Chinese company pulled out, too, leaving local Petropars solely responsible for the project.

There have been numerous reports from official Iranian news outlets about continued oil and gas exploration in defiance of US sanctions.