Addressing the inauguration ceremony of a new gasoline-making unit at Abadan Refinery on Friday, Qasemi said the facility had made Iran independent of gasoline imports, adding that the country would turn into an exporter of this important oil product by the next Iranian year (starting March 21.)
The Iranian oil minister further dismissed as ineffective the US-engineered sanctions against the country’s oil sector and said, “The progress made in the country’s oil industry has helped us leave behind … the sanctions.”
The new unit of Abadan Refinery will add two million liters of 94- and 95-octane super-premium gasoline to the daily production capacity of the Abadan facility, Iran’s oldest refinery.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Qasemi noted that the Islamic Republic has also undertaken to optimize several other refineries, including those in Bandar Abbas, Tabriz and Isfahan, saying that all of these projects will come on stream by March 2014 at the latest.
At the beginning of 2012, the United States and the European Union imposed new sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors with the goal of preventing other countries from purchasing Iranian oil and conducting transactions with the Central Bank of Iran. The sanctions came into effect in early summer 2012.
On October 15, 2012, the EU foreign ministers reached an agreement on another round of sanctions against Iran.
The illegal US-engineered sanctions have been imposed based on the unfounded allegations that Iran is pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.
Iran rejects the allegation, arguing that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
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