Following the temporary withdrawal of China from Phase 11 of Iran’s supergiant South Pars gas field due to the political backlash that the deal – and related deals – engendered, the Petroleum Ministry has been looking to domestic companies to keep production going in the meantime. Given the technical and financial constraints on local firms to undertake such major projects as each of the original 24 phases of South Pars, Petroleum Minister Bijan Zanganeh has split off elements of three of those phases – 11, 15, and 21 – to create three additional phases – 25, 26, and 27, respectively. With much of the work on these ‘new’ phases having already been done when they were part of the original phases, last week’s comment from Zanganeh that all of the offshore sections of all (now 27) South Pars phases would be fully developed in the first half of 2020 […]