The Ministry of Oil of Iran has launched a bidding round for 50 upstream oil and gas projects, where new contracts will be signed. Exploration and production (E&P) companies will have to submit their applications until 19 November and eligible bidders will be announced on 7 December 2016. Winners will sign new development contracts with Iran state-owned National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (by March 2017).
New contracts, divided into three main categories, namely exploration, development (of a discovered field leading to production) and EOR (to raise production levels), will be introduced as part of the bidding round. They would be up to 20-year long from the start of development and could be extended for 5 years in case of use of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques. Iran expects to attract more than US$100bn in investments to raise its oil production level by 1 mbl/d by the early 2020s.