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India, Iran agree on 25-year gas deals
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 14 May 2003, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: India on Tuesday agreed in principle to buy five million metric tonnes of liquid natural gas annually from Iran for a period of 25 years during which Iran will offer discovered and semi-discovered gas fields for Indian investment.
At a function attended by Minister of Petroleum Ram Naik and his Iranian counterpart Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, India also agreed on a contract to buy five million tonnes of crude oil from Iran this year.
The agreed minutes covering the longterm LNG purchase and investment in Iran were signed by M S Sreenivasan, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and the Iranian Deputy Minister for oil Seyed Mohamed Najad Hosainain in Tehran on Tuesday.
Naik said the commercial terms for the LNG deal will be worked out later though initial purchase will be in two phases of 2.5 million tonnes each. India has a similar long term agreement with Qatar and LNG from Qatar is scheduled to reach India in January next year.
India has also agreed to offer its technical knowhow to Iran for setting up CNG centers and CNG systems for using Compressed Natural Gas as automobile fuel, drawing from its experiment of Delhi where 70,000 vehicles including 10,000 buses run on CNG drastically cut pollution from automobiles, Naik said.