Yet no one is calling for improved safety measures or even showing concern about the rash of fires and explosions that have killed about two dozen industry staff in 17 months.
The fires and explosions are happening at the rate of one every three weeks, which one would expect would be sufficient to arouse some expression of concern and some emphasis on safety. But it has not.
Friday’s explosions were in an oil drilling rig, a natural gas pipeline and a refinery hundreds of miles apart.
One worker was killed and three others were injured when a blast occurred in the Bibi Hakimeh oilfield in Khuzestan province. Oilfield executives said the drillers were hunting for oil but struck an unexpected pocket of natural gas, which blew out the well in an explosion and fire. The incident was apparently somewhat like the major blowout last year in the British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, except this blowout was on land.
The second explosion and fire the same morning was at the brand new Shahzand refinery at Arak in Markazi province. No reason was given for the explosion at a brand new facility that was only opened less than two years ago.
Shahzand is a major part of the effort to expand gasoline production so that Iran is not dependent on imports. Majid Rajabi-Kahrizi, the acting director of the refinery, denied anything had happened in the operational part of the refinery. He said the fire might have been linked to contractors’ work in the area. Earlier, he had flatly denied there was any fire. These varying stories raised eyebrows.
Two days later, officials announced that the planned inauguration Monday of an expansion at Shahzand had been canceled due to “bad weather.” President Ahmadi-nejad had been due to attend the inauguration of the major expansion.
Shahzand is key to the regime’s gasoline plans. The expansion that was to be opened Monday would almost double gasoline output from 4.3 million liters a day to 8.3 million, with another expansion under construction and due for completion by Now Ruz to almost double output again to 16 million liters a day or one-quarter of the country’s consumption of about 60 million liters a day. Thus any damage at Shahzand is both politically and economically significant, not to mention career threatening to local administrators.
The third incident occurred in a 26-inch pipe that was bringing natural gas across Khuzestan province to be injected into the aging Gachsaran oilfield in order to keep the pressure up and stop the slow slide in oil output. Abdol-Amir Hoveyzavi, the managing director of the National Iranian South Oil Company, said, “The pipeline busted because its wall had been thinned due to corrosion.” He said a resulting fire was swiftly extinguished.
The fires and explosions have been all over the industry, involving pipelines, refineries, drilling rigs and tanker trucks.
Many of the descriptions of the impact and seriousness of the incidents have been contradictory.
The last previous incident was a fire at the Abadan oil refinery September 7. That was in a gasoline production cracker unit. The Fars news agency quoted Majlis Deputy Abdollah Kaabi, vice chair of the Majlis Energy Committee, as saying the fire was in the very same unit of the refinery that burned May 24 when President Ahmadi-nejad was visiting. He said four workmen were injured.
But Abadan refinery manager Moslem Rahimi denied that story. He told the Mehr news agency no one had been injured. He said all that happened was that some sparks from one of the Abadan furnaces set some grass near that furnace on fire, burning an area that was just 10 meters (30 feet) across. He said the fire had no impact on any of he refinery’s operations.
One month before that, an explosion August 5 was followed by an immense fire on a 20-inch pipeline that carries crude oil to a processing unit in Ahvaz. The flames engulfed a stretch of pipeline the length of three football fields and rose 40 meters (130 feet) into the sky. The fire was finally extinguished only after a 10-hour battle by firefighters.
Most analysts believe the rash of incidents reflects poor maintenance and little emphasis on safety precautions. However, there is always speculation about sabotage.
The 23 destructive events have been widely scattered at locations all around the country, which makes an organized campaign of sabotage appear unlikely. Also, no opposition group has claimed credit for any of the incidents. And no official has even broached sabotage as suspected.
The incidents have varied widely Last February, a fire engulfed several oil tanks on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf. Heydar Yarveisi, head of the Iranian Offshore Oil Co., said the blaze was caused by a lightning strike on an oil tank in a tank farm—one of the few cases in which an official ascribed a cause. He did not explain why lightning rods failed to protect the tanks from a strike.
Another incident involved the rupture of a huge 48-inch diameter crude oil pipeline near the city of Daylam on the Persian Gulf coast in Bushehr province. Some reports said there was an explosion in the pipeline; others simply described the pipeline as breaking open from corrosion.
Mohammad Baqeri, an official of the Environmental Protection Organization, told the Iranian Labor News Agency the oil had leaked for 10 to 15 hours, an astoundingly long time. Amir Sediqi, head of the Environmental Protection Department in the province, said an oil slick stretched 20 kilometers (12 miles) along the coastline and 8 kilometers (5 miles) out to sea.
What’s more, Baqeri said the rupture occurred inland and the oil was washed into the sea by a rainstorm so that 400 hectares (1.5 square miles) of farmland had been ruined as well.
There was an explosion last November 28 at the Tamarchin border checkpoint hear Piran-shahr in West Azerbaijan province. Nine tanker trucks that were being cleared through the border post caught fire. Three Iraqi drivers were killed. The governor of Piranshahr blamed the incident on the Iraqi drivers for leaving their trucks unattended and failing to observe safety and traffic rules. It wasn’t explained how the drivers were killed in the explosion if they had left their vehicles unattended.
An explosion October 21 destroyed the deck of an oil pipe storehouse in Khorramshahr. An announcement said one man was killed and two others injured. It blamed the blast on some ammunition that had been stored at the site during the 1980-88 war and never removed. No one has said why the ammunition was not removed in 22 years.
An immense explosion August 6 last year near Mashhad erupted as a bulldozer operator was trying to dig a trench for a new gas pipeline but hit an existing gas pipeline. The resulting ball of fire engulfed an area 600 meters, or more than a third of a mile, across. There were conflicting reports on deaths and injuries, but at least four workmen died that day. Some reports said the death toll later reached 10 because of serious injuries.
The 23 disruptions have not only been widely scattered physically but have involved gas, oil and petrochemicals. The map below shows the locales.
In August of last year, five men were killed when a blast erupted from a gas leak while workmen were welding an ethane pipeline at the Pardis petrochemical plant in Assaluyeh port on the Persian Gulf coast. The plant had been inaugurated days earlier by President Ahmadi-nejad.
This May another explosion erupted at the huge Abadan oil refinery the very day Ahmadi-nejad had arrived to formally inaugurate an expansion there. Critics blamed Ahmadi-nejad, saying the plant was not ready to be opened and he had rushed things. But all around the world, formal inaugurations take place at building sites where the work has not been completed. The condemnations of Ahmadi-nejad died out in days, indicating that even the vocal critics did not believe what they were saying.
The first in this chain of incidents occurred May 29 of last year with an oil well blowout and fire in Kermanshah province. Firefighters needed nearly 40 days—an inordinate length of time by international standards—to extinguish the blaze, which killed three workers, injured a dozen more, and sent balls of flame into the air. At its height, that fire was consuming 8,000 barrels of oil a day.