Iran is open to international partnerships in the oil and gas industry, offering “golden investment opportunities” in the area, oil minister Mohsen Paknejad said this week, during a meeting with a senior Belarusian official.
Paknejad added that Tehran had already built a portfolio of contracts with what Mehr News cited him as describing as “friendly nations”, at his meeting with Belarusian energy minister Andrei Kuznetsov.
The statement follows a higher-level meeting between the presidents of Iran and Belarus, where they signed a number of cooperation agreements across industries.
Iran has been actively seeking partners to boost its oil and gas industry amid Western sanctions. China and Russia have emerged as its main allies, with China taking in most of Iran’s oil exports, despite the sanctions.
The alliance appears to be working, with official data showing Iran ramped up crude oil output to 4.3 million barrels daily in 2024. Simon Watkins reported for Oilprice in October that Tehran’s plans for this year are for a further boost in production, with an unnamed source close to the government saying that “Assistance has come from Russia, on the ground and from equipment and technology, and China is still a big buyer, in keeping with the long-term agreements done [by Iran] with both.”
Bloomberg, for its part, reported earlier this month that Chinese independent refiners had ramped up their purchases of Iranian crude following the issue of a new batch of crude import quotas, again in spite of U.S. and EU sanctions.
This, however, is not to say that sanctions have not had an effect on Iran’s exports. Iranian crude in floating storage has been swelling, tanker-tracking companies report, and is likely to continue swelling, because Chinese demand is not strong enough to absorb all of it, Bloomberg also wrote in its report.