Iran Targets South Pars Plant 6 Restart to Resolve Gas Capacity Bottleneck

Iran's National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) has identified the restoration of the sixth gas processing plant at the South Pars field as the critical bottleneck for recovering lost production capacity. Said Tooki, the company's CEO, stated that the first gas train of this facility will return to the production cycle within the current year. This operational shift directly addresses the physical processing constraints created by the incident, moving the system from a state of emergency recovery to normal technological operation. The incident, which occurred in late February or early March of the previous year, damaged the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth processing plants at the South Pars complex. The outage removed approximately 230 million cubic meters of gas per day from the national supply chain, a volume that represented roughly one-third of Iran's total gas production at the time. In response, an "early production” program was activated to mitigate the deficit. While initial plans targeted the deployment of four phases to restore 106 million cubic meters per day, the actual recovery via three active phases reached approximately 100 million cubic meters per day, exceeding the original commitment of 94 million cubic meters. Responsibility for the physical repair and restart has been divided between two state entities. The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is handling the third and fifth plants, while the NIGC is responsible for the fourth and sixth. Although construction is not the NIGC's primary function, it assumed these projects to leverage its specialized experience in operating such installations, thereby accelerating the process. An executive working group was established to coordinate these efforts, holding its first meeting on the 17th of Farvardin (late February/early March).