Iran makes the best of it

Sanctions are constraining Iran’s output and straining oil storage capacity

The latest round of sanctions on Iran have confronted its petroleum industry with a new set of challenges. For at least two decades, it has struggled to sustain production at its ageing oil fields. Now, as under the Obama-era confrontation, sanctions pose a different problem: how to keep oil exports going as best as possible. When the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) came into force in January 2016, a new Iran Petroleum Contract was being defined to cover a range of fields for foreign investment. But this process made little progress, with the most advanced deal, with France’s Total and China’s CNPC for development of Phase 11 of the South Pars gas field, ending with Total’s exit i