The Foresight of Iran's heavy crude oil export in 2040: a scenario writing approach

Heavy oil as an unconventional oil resource contains 15 and 10.5 percentage of global hydrocarbon proven reserves and production respectively. Since the share of conventional and tight oil in world oil production is dwindling, it is expected that heavy oil play an important role in global market in the long-term. Therefore, countries with massive heavy oil reserve such as Iran would be significant players in the future. This paper aims to identify the national and global key factors and driving forces which play significant roles in reshaping the Iran’s heavy oil future, then presents Iran’s heavy oil export plausible scenarios by 2040. The 27 key factors were extracted using the Delphi method through questionnaires and environment scanning based on the STEEP framework using mathematical and statistical analysis. In the next step, the application of Cross impact analysis identifies the 16 driving forces of the Iran’s future heavy oil export using the MicMac software.Then based on academic literature and expert panel, 60 variants identified for all descriptors. In the next step, 16 consistence and plausible scenarios have been chosen using scenario wizard software. At the end, after evaluating and endorsing all the 16 scenarios by the expert panel, 5 final scenarios named “In the Sanction’s Labyrinth”, “East Without West”, “The Great Virus”, “The bond with the World” and “The Lost Opportunities” have been written.