“Although we have not received an official suggestion to join the Nabucco project, if there would be an official request, we will consider it,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Ministry Alireza Sheikh Attar said.

The Nabucco pipeline project, valued at $12.9 billion, would link the European market with the energy-rich producing nations of central Asian countries via Azerbaijan, Georgia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungry, Romania and Austria.

Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, and more recently Iraq, are also considered potential suppliers of natural gas through the Nabucco pipeline, with backing in particular from the US for Iraq’s involvement.

The US opposes plans to have the Nabucco pipeline supplied with natural gas from Iran, although a number of other countries, including Turkey, Switzerland and Germany, have expressed serious interest in importing gas from the Islamic Republic.

The Managing Director of Iran’s National Gas Exports Company, Nosratollah Seifi had earlier said the project was already stalled in the absence of any guarantee that enough gas will actually flow through the pipeline to justify the project.

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The Russian gas giant will invest the sum in the Iran-Armenia gas project by the end of 2009, Armenia’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Armen Movsisyan, said Friday.

Once completed, the 140-km pipeline would provide Armenia with an alternative to the gas it now imports from Russia. For each cubic meter of Iranian gas, Armenia is scheduled to return 3 kilowatt hours of electric energy to Iran.

The remarks by Movsisyan come as Tehran plays host to a delegation from Gazprom today to continue talks on joint energy projects.

Gazprom’s Chief Executive Officer, Alexei Miller, traveled to Iran in February and held talks with Iranian Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari.

Iran holds the second largest gas reserves in the world after Russia.

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To finalize the negotiations Iran has given OMV two months, of which 25 days has already passed, said Naji Sadouni, managing director of Iran’s Petroleum Engineering and Development Company (PEDEC).

OMV has not submitted its master development plan (MDP) for the Band-e Karkheh oilfield yet and if the negotiations are not finalized during the given period, the development of the field will be given to a domestic company, Shana quoted him as saying.

Band-e Karkheh, located in the northwest of Ahwaz, capital of Iran’s oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan, is estimated to have a production capacity of 40,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

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The flow of natural gas from Turkmenistan to Iran was resumed in April after a four-month disruption.

‘During our last winter, we had a stoppage because they (Turkmenistan) had to carry out some emergency maintenance work on its facilities,” the Iranian Deputy Oil Minister, Seyyed Reza Kassaeizadeh, who is also managing Director of the National Iranian Gas Company, told Reuters by telephone from Tehran.

He declined to reveal price details, except to say that they were based on a mutually agreed formula.

Iran gets about 5 percent of its gas needs from Turkmenistan mainly for consumption in its northeastern region, which is far from the country’s southern gas-fields and closer to those of Turkmenistan.

At the time when Turkmenistan halted gas deliveries, the volume of gas Iran imported from Turkmenistan was 23-24 million cubic meters per day.

Iran’s northeastern region struggled with the freezing wintry weather last year, unprecedented in decades, after Turkmenistan halted its gas delivery.

Turkmenistan had cited technical problems as one of the reasons for suspending gas exports to Iran, but at the time Iranian officials said that Ashgabat was also seeking a higher price for the natural gas it supplied to Iran.

Kassaeizadeh noted that the country could possibly have 10 percent of global gas trade in about 20 years, as it had several projects set to come on stream during the period.

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“The technical issues are finalized, the negotiations on signing the agreement are all done and currently both sides are finalizing the attachments to the agreement,” IRIB News quoted the Managing Director of Iran’s Petroleum Engineering and Development Company (PEDEC), Naji Sadouni, as saying .

Sadouni noted the high priority given to the development of this oilfield, adding that the cleaning work on the field will be started next month.

“The time that has been set for finalizing negotiations on the project between the two parties may not be extended,” he added.

Sadouni also referred to the development of the Changuleh oilfield in the Anaran block, saying that negotiations to develop this field is ongoing with domestic private contractors.

Currently, Russian Luke Oil Co. is cooperating with Iran in the development of the Anaran block, in which it holds a 25-percent stake.

The Anaran oilfield is located in Iran’s southwestern province of Ilam. So far, over $100 million has been invested in the oilfield.

The oil reserves of Anaran are based on the two fields of Azar and Changuleh, which are estimated to hold oil reserves of some 7.4 billion barrels between them.

StatoilHydro ASA is a Norwegian energy company, formed by the 2007 merger of Statoil with the oil and gas division of Norsk Hydro. StatoilHydro is the biggest offshore oil and gas company in the world.

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Mohd Hassan Marican, chief executive of Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas), cited the increase in development costs as well as the soaring steel prices as the reasons for the firm’s delay in finalizing its decision to invest in gas-abundant Iran.

“As a result of that (high development costs), the economic and commercial model that was previously worked on does not make the project viable anymore,” Reuters quoted him as saying in an interview in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on Monday.

According to an initial agreement, Petronas will have a 10-percent share in a project to develop parts of Iran’s South Pars gas field while France’s Total will hold 40 percent. Iran has repeatedly extended the deadline for both companies to make a final decision on investing in the project.

“It’s very difficult to put a timeline. There are many parts of the equation that must be revisited before a final investment decision can be made, and this is not entirely dependent on us, it also involves the host government. All these things take time, we have said we are continuing with the discussions,” explained the Petronas CEO.

“We have to reach the end of the line before either one can move ahead or not move ahead. It’s a continuing process of discussions,” Hassan concluded.

South Pars is one the biggest natural gas fields in the world, which extends under Iran and Qatar. According to Iran’s Pars Special Economic Energy Zone, the field contains nearly 48 percent of Iran’s confirmed reserves.

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Nozari insisted that oil producers are capable of supplying oil as much as the market has the capacity to receive.

“But at the moment, the market is saturated,” he said.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries supplies oil based on the needs of the market, Nozari noted.

Iran is the second biggest oil producer within OPEC after Saudi Arabia.

Nozari’s comment came amid skyrocketing oil prices that have raised concerns among consumers.

New York’s main oil futures contract, light sweet crude for July delivery, was traded at $135.40 a barrel on Thursday.

Nozari also added that his oil-rich country is in talks with neighboring Iraq over a series of joint oil fields including Azar oil field.

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“So far, we have invested $90 million and if we are allowed to develop the field, we would be investing around $3 billion,” a senior source at Indian Oil Corp (IOC), a partner in the investment venture, was quoted as saying by Reuters Friday.

ONGC and IOC each hold a 40 percent stake in the joint project, which is expected to begin producing gas in three years, while the remaining 20 percent belongs to Oil India.

“In December 2007, we had submitted a gas commerciality report with Iranian authorities,” said the IOC source.

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Gholam-Hossein Nozari also stressed the importance of managing how to economize Iran’s domestic consumption of natural gas.

“If we mange our natural gas resource well we can have a more serious role in the economic development of the country and in creating a booming industry,” IRNA quoted him as saying.

Nozari also said while Iran has 15.5 percent of the world’s natural gas reserverves, its share of the world’s natural gas market was a mere 1 percent.

The two-day Second National Iran Gas Congress was inaugurated Saturday in the Congress Hall of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting complex in Tehran.

The event, which was attended by the country’s high-ranking officials, energy specialists and experts, aims to help Iran secure an additional market share by enhancing the available information on both energy investment and growing global gas demands.

The conference also seeks to provide a proper framework for research and development activities related to the gas sector.

Among the topics scheduled to go under discussion at the gathering are industrial management, the discovery and exploitation of gas reservoirs, transport and distribution of gas, human resources and executive management, strategic planning, fuel efficiency and new methods of economically sustainable gas consumption.

Health, safety and the environment are also on the agenda of the conference.

Special workshops related to the gas sector will be held on the sidelines of the conference, which concludes Sunday.

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“Recent drilling in Jofeir has led to the discovery of a new oilfield with an in-place reserve of 750 million barrels,” Iranian Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari said on Saturday.

Nozari added that with the new discovery, Jofeir’s current output of 25,000 barrels per day would increase to 33,000 barrels.

The first phase of the project with the output of 15,000 barrels per day will be launched in the coming year, while the second phase with the output of 10,000 barrels per day will be commissioned in 2011.

Iran, the world’s fourth largest crude oil exporter, announced in September that it had signed a $450 million contract with Belarus for Minsk to extract 40,000 barrels of oil per day from its Jofeir oilfield.

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