An Iranian oil official told Mehr about the on the way Russian oil tankers mooring on Iran’s southern Caspian port of Neka.
Hamidreza Shahdoust, a regional authority of the Iranian Oil Terminals Company (IOTC) in North of Iran recounted the details of the three development projects in the southern Caspian port of Neka in north of Iran in which the requirements to receive 14,000-ton oil tankers are met and the boost in the oil swap with the Caspian Sea littoral states is on the horizon.
“The port could not allow docking by large tankers” he said and called it one of the key drawbacks of the port which now is taken care of by constructing and developing storage tanks, loading and unloading wharves, single-point moorings (SPM) as well as onshore and offshore facilities.
According to the official, the plan will make it possible for very large foreign oil tankers to call on the port and transfer Iran's oil to northern Caspian terminals.
The development plan is projected to increase the oil swap capacity of the Neka terminal from the current volume of 120,000 to 500,000 bpd in the initial phase, and then to 1.5 and 2.5 million bpd in later phases.
In his last month’s interview with Bloomberg, Iran’s Minister of Petroleum Bijan Zangeneh talked about his agreement with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak to have a daily swap of 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iran’s oil in return for steel, wheat and machinery from Russia and other Eurasian nations, namely Kazakhstan and Belarus.