نشریه سیاست نامه علم و فناوری
سال پنجم شماره 4 (پیاپی 13، زمستان 1394)

Oil discovery and extraction identified oil earnings’ role in governing societies and the way of expending oil earnings affected economics of country. Thence, the connection between government and oil earnings determines the origin of social and economic problems. In this paper, managing oil revenues and costs patterns of it from oil discovery to the end of fifth development plan after Iran revolution are considered and investigated. As well, the way of expending oil revenues are studied in several countries and an optimal framework is designed for government and oil connection.

World energy market especially nonrenewable energies markets have experienced significant changes in recent years. Main portion of conventional oil and gas resources belongs to national oil companies. The purposes of NOCs are profit maximizing, redistribution of wealth in society, energy diplomacy, energy security, and national economic development. These purposes affect principle functions of NOCs to protect national wealth. Thence, establishing a trade-off between commercial and non-commercial goals to reach the best performance in a long term basis is one of the main concerns. Considering growing trend of energy consumption in oil and gas producing countries and welfare costs increase, serious difficulties is predictable for most NOCs in Persian Gulf, Russia, southern America to cover oil demand increase in the United States, China, and emerging governments in Asia. It sounds like that investigating the possibility of entrance to downstream industries should be one of the main concerns of NOCs in international levels. As well as their economic advantages, it can act as leverage for avoiding international pressures.

Iraq is announced as one of the first fifth countries which hold the most crude oil inventories and the first fifteenth world gas reserves. The ten-year-old plan of oil and gas fields development in this country which has been started in 2008, has experienced four of tenders between the years 2009 and 2012. Oil production of this country has reached 3.2 million barrels a day in 2012 and placed Iraq in the third place as a petroleum exporter before Iran. There are serious uncertainties about crude oil stocks and production in Iraq. Also, various statistics are issued by different sources. Critical challenges for Iraq in developing oil fields are: lack of export terminals, electricity shortage, lack of water for injecting oil fields, insecurity, restrictions wells and other top level equipment limitations, legal uncertainties, expert labor limitations, and insufficient financing. The effective presence of various Chinese companies in Iraq’s fields demonstrates special strategic attention of China to Iraq’s hydrocarbon resources for oncoming requirements of this country. This may lead to replacement of Iran’s oil with Iraq’s and change Chinese oil supply strategies. As a result, Iranian oil embargo may potentially maintain and expanded.

Shale gas revolution in the United States has led into much insecurity in world gas markets. America is the mere producer of shale gas in world at the moment. If the technology proliferate and transfer to other countries to overcome the oncoming challenges therefore inexpensive gas will be distributed among consumers. They predict that proper development of shale gas fields will provide 20% of gas required in the world. At the moment, there are serious difficulties in technical, economical, and environmental areas for shale gas development. Technical problems are: restriction in reaching shale gas technologies, need for intensive oil drilling, low reserves recovery factor, limited access to water, high density of population in white areas. Economic problems are high production costs and lack of reliance on future costs of natural gas. Environmental concerns are greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater pollution due to hydraulic fracturing Operations with chemicals, increment in earthquakes likelihood, reprocessed water pollution to radioactive materials, and the possibility of shale gas leak to atmosphere and water.

Changes in consumption patterns of petroleum products in our country and low production rate of propylene in petrochemical refineries need to be considered. On one hand, petrochemical industries are paying attention to propylene production in order to use petroleum products as food. On the other hand, the producers look for alternatives for petroleum products. To overcome these challenges, petrochemical refinery is mentioned as an alternative. This study follows a business oriented approach to survey different scenarios of establishing petrochemical refineries. Despite the fact that petrochemical refineries development based on naphtha cracking or kerosene (which are preferred to aromatics) retains more propylene production and results in investment return rate of 18% in comparison to refineries, taking the business oriented approach into account, an insightful perspective about petrochemical refineries in Iran cannot be predicted.

Industries required goods and equipment are categorized based on special criteria after purchase. This is one the main challenges of supply chains which causes obstacles and different challenges for supplying goods in national gas company. To overcome these problems, a deep knowledge of their reasons is needed. Lack of knowledge in this context will not fix them. In this paper, considering project of standardization of exclusive coded parts of oil and gas products for localizing 3000 parts is investigated and the reasons are discussed. These reasons are adopted by discussing with experts, examining the work procedure and its precedence in national gas company.