Iran plans to purchase 15 new oil drilling rigs in the calendar year that ends in March 2026 with an investment of $800 million.

The CEO of the National Iranian Drilling Company (NIDC) said on Tuesday that the firm plans to spend another $200-300 million on purchasing cement and nitrogen pumps to expand its drilling operations.

Mehran Mokvandi said that the NIDC plans to drill 130-150 new oil wells in Iran in the current calendar year.

Mokvandi said that the company, which is a subsidiary of the state oil company NIOC, has an extensive renovation program to replace its aging equipment and machinery with more powerful drilling installations.

The remarks come as Iran presses ahead with plans to increase its oil production and exports despite US sanctions that have restricted the supply of foreign investment and technology to the country’s massive energy sector.

Experts say US sanctions, which were first imposed in 2018 and were later expanded to target almost all aspects of the Iranian oil industry, have failed to affect the country’s supply of oil to the international markets.

They say Iran’s current oil exports of nearly 2 million barrels per day (bpd), versus a pre-sanction figure of more than 2.5 million bpd, is a clear testament to the country’s success in using domestic resources for developing its oilfields.

In a major development in early March, the NIOC awarded some $17 billion worth of contracts to domestic companies for a major pressure-boosting project in South Pars, the world’s largest gas field that straddles the maritime border between Iran and Qatar in the Persian Gulf.

The company said at the time that its domestic partners will install some 42 giant rigs weighing some 420,000 metric tons in South Pars as part of the contracts awarded for the pressure-boosting project in the field.   

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