Iran will seek to boost its oil output to 4.3 million barrels per day (bpd) by next March from 4.2 million bpd now, the head of the state oil company was quoted as saying on Sunday.
The comments by Seifollah Jashnsaz, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), comes less than two weeks after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying the country was reviewing a proposal to reduce crude production.
A senior energy official later said the world's fourth-largest crude producer had no plans to cut exports. Jashnsaz told the Mehr News Agency in an interview Iran's oil reserves stood at 136 billion barrels. Saying Iran currently produced 4.2 million bpd, he added: "We will try to raise that to 4.3 million bpd by the end of the (current Iranian) year." The 2008-09 Iranian year ends on March 20.
The Oil Ministry's main plan was to develop small oil fields and also to raise return from those already under production, Jashnsaz said, adding Iran was "not expecting to discover any major oil fields in the country henceforth." Iran, the second largest producer in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), has made windfall gains from the high oil price in recent years.