He said production of natural gas from the phase will reach its maximum by the weekend from currently 480 million cubic feet/day.
Up to January 21, 2017, the third and fourth sweetening stations of the phase will be ready to yield gas operation and exploitation of platform 20 are completed.
Phases 20 and 21 of South Pars, have the capacity for extraction of 56 million cubic meters of sour gas a day, and once they are operational, after completion of the refining and sweetening operations, 50 million cubic meters of sweet gas will be injected to the nationwide network.
For now, the capacity for extraction from South Pars gas field has reached more than 515 million cubic meters/day.
South Pars gas field is one of the biggest independent gas sources worldwide, lying on Iran-Qatar joint maritime border in Persian Gulf. The field stretches on 9,700 square kilometers of land and Iran's share is 3,700 kms out of the total. On this basis, the field has 14 trillion cubic meters of gas along with 18 billion barrels of gas condensates, which constitute for more than eight percent of the world total gas reserves and close to half of Iran's gas reserves.
This year, there are plans to put into operation the remaining phases, namely phases 17, 18 and 19, which is equal to two standard phases, and phases 20 and 21 so as to dramatically narrow down the gap of gas exploitation with Qatar. In not far future, the production of the two countries will equal.