September 06, 2019
Iran has started exporting gasoline for the first time ever, a development being loudly touted by officials as an example of the great success of the Islamic Republic.
The head of the Persian Gulf Star Refinery, Mohammad-Ali Dadvar, said the first cargo was shipped out of the country August 3 and means Iran is now a player in the international gasoline market. He noted it has been more than a century since Iran first pumped crude oil out of the ground.
He claimed the sale was priced at $20 above the market rate—but did not explain why anyone would pay above market rate. He also said the gasoline was of higher quality than Euro-5 gasoline, which contains less than 10 parts per million (PPM) of sulfur. He said the Iranian gasoline he sold contains less than 1 ppm of sulfur.
Last winter, one official quoted in the media said Iran was producing more than enough gasoline to meet its needs and was already exporting gasoline, while another official was quoted as saying Iran had decided not to export any gasoline for now.
According to Oil Minister Bijan Namdar-Zanganeh, with the inauguration last February 17 of the third phase of the Persian Gulf Star Refinery in Bandar Abbas, all of Iran’s refineries combined were pumping out more gasoline than Iran needs. According to Shana, the news agency of the Oil Ministry, he said the government wants to build up its reserve stocks before exporting anything. “We have no export plans,” he was quoted as saying then.
But the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) reported that Alireza Sadeqabadi, the head of the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Co., said that very same day that Iran was now exporting gasoline to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraqi Kurdistan and some of the Persian Gulf littoral states. ISNA quoted him as saying no gasoline had been imported since September.
Shana quoted him as saying that Iran consumed 87 million liters a day of gasoline while it produced 103 million, producing an excess of 16 million liters.
However, Azerbaijan’s Trend news agency reported that a deputy oil minister said Iran would have to begin importing gasoline again in another two years if it failed to curtail the rapid growth in gasoline consumption.
Iran has been eager to show that it is producing lots of higher quality gasoline, specifically gasoline that meets the Euro-5 standards set by the EU in 2009. The EU replaced Euro-5 with higher Euro-6 standards in 2014, but Iran never talks about Euro-6.