TEHRAN, July 17 (Shana) � Vice president of the Iranian Offshore Engineering and Construction Company (IOEC) said the company has planned to installed 4 offshore platforms at different phases of the supergiant South Pars Gas Field by the end of the current Iranian calendar year to March 20 2017.

Rahim Tabrizi said IOEC will install and launch platforms 19A, 19B, 20 and 21 of the gas field by March 2017.

IOEC is developing the offshore sections of phases 19, 20 and 21 of the South Pars gas field and is the only company in the Middle East to carry out its operations will its possessed equipment.

Tabrizi made his remarks on the sidelines of the successful installation of platform 19A at Phase 19 of the gas field in the late hours of Saturday.

Installation of the structure, weighing over 2,700 tons, took only two hours which is a new record in installation of such mega structures in offshore operations.

The full installation of the platform will take until Tuesday.

Phase 19 of the South Pars gas field is located in border regions with Qatar, which shares the field with Iran in Persian Gulf waters.

Once operational, the phase will add 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas output to the field's daily production.

Loading of platform 19A, with a capacity of recovering half a billion cubic feet of gas/day, began last month together with another platform belonging to phase 21 at Khorramshahr Yard. Abouzar 110 Barge carried the two structures.

Phase 19 of the supergiant South Pars Gas Field is a leading project in new development operations over the field. The phase came on-stream in April with 7mcm/d of natural gas output.

Phase 19 development of South Pars is set to produce 50 mcm/d of sweet gas, 75,000 b/d of gas condensate, 400 tons a day of sulfur, 1.05 million tons a year of liquefied petroleum gas and one million tons a year of ethane.

This development phase was awarded by Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC) to a Petropars-led consortium of Petropars Limited and Petropars Iran and IOEC in June 2010 under an engineering, procurement, construction (EPC) contract.

Petropars Limited and Petropars Iran are responsible for onshore installations and drilling operations.

By SHANA