A National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) said that based on the latest estimate, the total volume of the country's hydrocarbon reserves has increased by one billion barrels due to new discoveries.
Karim Zobeidi, NIOC's deputy managing director for consolidated planning, told Shana on Sunday that the latest estimate shows the volume of Iran's total hydrocarbon reserves, including crude oil and gas condensate, has increased by one billion barrels in the year to March 20, 2015 compared to the figure for the year earlier.
Zobeidi's remarks came after Iran's deputy oil minister and managing director of the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC), Roknoddin Javadi, recently told Mehr News Agency that Iran has discovered new reserves of crude oil and natural gas.
He added that new figures on recoverable oil and gas reserves will be announced by oil minister in the near future.
Meanwhile, Salbali Karimi, managing director of the Iranian Central Oilfields Company, confirmed that new crude oil and natural gas reserves have been found in central oil-rich regions of Iran.
The London-based British Petroleum (BP) released a report last year describing Iran as possessing the world's biggest natural gas reserves by the end of 2013.
According to BP report, total volume of Iran's natural gas reserves has increased by 200 billion cubic meters to hit 33.8 trillion cubic meters (tcm), exceeding by 2.5 tcm the natural gas reserves of Russia, which is currently the world's top exporter of natural gas.
In terms of natural gas reserves, Iran was followed by Russia (31.3 tcm), Qatar and Turkmenistan (17.5 tcm each), and the United States (9.3 tcm).
British Petroleum further said in its latest report that Iran's crude oil reserves stand at 157 billion barrels, adding that the country ranks fourth in the world with 9.3 percent of the world's total oil reserves and accounting for 19.4 percent of the Middle East's crude oil reserves.