TEHRAN, Nov 10: Pakistan and Iran have finalised a contract for a gas export deal scheduled to be signed within a month.
“The content of the peace pipeline contract has been finalised and all the points prepared by the two sides’ legal experts have been re-read and agreed by the two sides,” Iran’s deputy minister in charge of the project, Hojatollah Ghanimifard, was quoted as saying by the Iranian oil ministry’s news service Shana on Saturday.
“The remaining points which are technical issues... must be studied within a month to make the contract ready for the simultaneous signing by the heads of the two countries,” he said.
“The conditions of a contract with India will be exactly the same as with Pakistan. If the Indians are not too late, based on the current market conditions, the price terms will not change,” he said.
Mr Ghanimifard stressed that Iran had not received any official statement from India indicating that it had withdrawn from the project.
Talking on the sidelines of talks in the National Iranian Oil Company’s guesthouse, Petroleum and Natural Resources Secretary Farrukh Qayyum said Pakistan preferred to meet its gas needs through Iran and it would study other options in next stages.
“Given the growth of domestic economy and the development of local industries, the demand for gas has considerably risen in Pakistan during the recent years,” he told reporters.
The government would study gas imports from Qatar and Turkmenistan after it finalised the peace pipeline with Iran, he said.
He expressed his satisfaction on the ongoing talks, saying that the two sides had reached an agreement on many points.
Both sides will review the gas pricing mechanism when there is a change in the correlation between Japan LNG and Japan crude oil mix.—AFP/APP
