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Tehran: Asia can provide the finance Iran needs to develop its oil and gas reserves, the world's second largest, limiting the impact of US sanctions and pressure, a top Iranian oil official said on Thursday.
"The financial world is not just in the western hemisphere," Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, vice-president for investment affairs at Iran's state oil company NIOC, said.
"Iran's call on international financing for oil and gas can easily be moved to the east from the west."
State-run Asian companies keen to secure future energy supplies have resisted pressure from the United States to stay away from the world's fourth-largest oil exporter Iran.
The US has sought to isolate Iran over its nuclear programme, which Tehran says is to generate electricity. The US has imposed sanctions on Iran's oil and gas sector for over a decade. More recently, it has put pressure on international banks not to finance deals in Iran.
New partners
"This kind of pressure from the United States is nothing new," Ghanimifard said. "Just the tactics are different. The policy is the same. We have learned to live without US technology, help and money. How easily we have been able to find new partners." Iran is negotiating an exploration deal with Asian oil companies for two oil and gas blocks in the Caspian Sea, he said, declining to say which companies were involved.
A study had shown that Iran's Caspian region contains an estimated 21 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent, he said. The deal could take the form of a production sharing contract (PSC), if Iran's parliament and authorities agreed that model of contract was the best for the high-cost Caspian, he added.
Iranian law forbids foreign investment in Iran's upstream energy sector, but exceptions could be granted, Ghanimifard said.
Foreign companies working in the sector have done so on the basis of buy-back deals, under which they receive a share of output for a brief period as repayment for investment.
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