The development came on Thursday during the inauguration of a semi-industrial petchem plant in southern Iranian port city of Mahshahr where some 120,000 metric tons of propylene will be produced each year from methanol and independently of the original feedstock, Press TV reported.

Seyyed Omid Shahidinia, a local Oil Ministry official said during the inauguration ceremony that the commercial use of MPT had been monopolized by two countries which he would not identify.

“They would not let us have the technology due to the sanctions, and now Iran is the third country which has obtained this technical expertise,” said Shahidinia, making a reference to American sanctions that have sought to hamper Iran’s efforts to develop its energy sector.

Concurrent with the inauguration, Oil Ministry officials in Tehran awarded a contract to Fateh Petrochemicals for commercial use of MPT in Iran.

The contract, which is related to the petchem plant in Mahshahr, would enable Iran to significantly increase its propylene output in the upcoming years, according to Behzad Mohammadi, a deputy oil minister and CEO of Ian’s largest company in the sector, namely the National Petrochemical Company (NPC).

Mohammadi said Iran had eyed a propylene output of two million tons per year for 2025 but he insisted that the figure would increase to 4 million tons by 2026 through implementing various schemes including the use of MTP technology.

The senior official said Iran’s current propylene output is nearly one million tons per year, adding that total production capacity for all petrochemical products has reached around 70 million tons per year.

Mohammadi said actual petchem output in Iran reached 30 million tons worth $15 billion in the year to March 2020 of which some $10 billion worth of products were sold to foreign customers.

The outbreak of the virus in Iran is one of the deadliest outside of China, where the disease originated.

Twenty have died in the southwestern province of Iran, Khuzestan and seven in the northern province of Alborz after consuming methanol alcohol, IRNA reported.

Drinking alcohol is banned in Iran for everyone.

Local media regularly report on lethal cases of poisoning caused by bootleg liquor. A spokesman for Jundishapur Medical University in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan, said 218 people had been hospitalized after being poisoned.

The intoxication cases were caused by “rumors that drinking alcohol can be effective in treating coronavirus,” Ali Ehsanpour said.

Ahvaz judiciary officials said on Monday that five people have been arrested in the city over distributing the drinking alcohol.

The deputy prosecutor of Ahvaz, Mohammad Aqayari, told IRNA the dead had drunk methanol after being “misled by content online, thinking they were fighting coronavirus and curing it.”

If ingested in large quantities, methanol can cause blindness, liver damage, and death.

Iran has been scrambling to contain the spread of the COVID-19 which has hit all of the country’s provinces, killing at least 237 people and infecting more than 7,000.

According to IRNA, 16 out of 69 confirmed cases died of coronavirus infection in Khuzestan as of Sunday.

The country’s health care system, burdened by US sanctions, has faced shortages in supplies and medicine as it fights to contain the crisis.