SHANA- The Middle East's first floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit is on heading toward the supergiant South Pars Gas Field to recover oil from its oil layer, managing director of Petroiran Company said.

 

"The $300-million FPSO unit was built in Singapore and will be deployed above the South Pars' oil layer in the near future," Roham Qasemi said on Saturday.
National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has purchased by unit. The official said the vessel is now sailing in the Persian Gulf, he said.
FPSO is a floating vessel used by the offshore oil and gas industry for the production, processing and storage of hydrocarbons. It is designed to draw hydrocarbons or receive crude oil from nearby platforms and process and store it.
The main advantage of an FPSO is in deep waters where laying a pipeline is usually not cost effective or even practical.
Several wells have been drilled in the oil layer of South Pars and the ground is prepared to extract crude oil from the shared field, said Qasemi.
He said extraction of crude oil will begin in a matter of two months once the offshore wells of the oil layer are connected to the vessel via pipelines would take two months and the piping operation is complete.
 
The South Pars' oil layer is located 130 kilometers off Iran's coast in the Persian Gulf with an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil in place. Iran expects to start production with 20,000-35,000 barrels a day.