TEHRAN (TCA) — Iran has signed an agreement with Russia’s LUKOIL oil company to jointly look for hydrocarbon reserves in the southern parts of the Caspian Sea. The agreement is significant given that the Caspian littoral states — Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan — are yet to determine maritime and seabed boundaries of the Sea, Iran’s PressTV news agency reported.
The agreement was signed during a visit to Moscow by Iran’s Petroleum Minister Bijan Zangeneh.
LUKOIL said on October 4 that its wholly owned subsidiary, LUKOIL-Engineering, and the National Iranian Oil Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed to enhance mutually beneficial cooperation, which implies basin modeling and analysis of the petroleum systems of northwest areas of the Persian Gulf, the Abadan plateau and the South Caspian basin.
It is the first time for Iran and Russia to cooperate over an energy-related project in the Caspian Sea.
Despite extensive negotiations, the legal status of the Caspian Sea has been unclear since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The littoral states refrain from conducting oil and gas exploration operations in border areas that could put them into an ownership dispute with the neighbors. Therefore, chances are high that Iran’s partnership with Lukoil could eventually help demarcate the basin boundaries between the five countries.
Iran has already discovered an oil field — Sardar-e Jangal — in the southern part of the Caspian Sea.
Sardar-e-Jangal field contains an estimated 1.4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in-place and some 500 million barrels of recoverable crude. Experts believe it could become Iran’s first major oil/gas field development project in the Caspian Sea, as the country has already made progress in studying the field’s geological structures and its reserves, Iran’s English-language newspaper the Financial Tribune wrote in a recent report.
