Executives of BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, and industrial gases and engineering giant Linde met energy officials in Tehran this week to discuss investment and transfer of technology, Abbas She’ri Moqaddam, managing director of Iran's state-owned National Petrochemical Company (NPC), has told journalists.

The two companies were part of a German delegation headed by vice chancellor and economics minister Sigmar Gabriel. The subject of the talks was said to be revival of projects agreed before sanctions were imposed on Tehran in 2011 and then put on ice. Before the sanctions began to bite, Germany was Iran's largest trading partner in the EU. Linde – which built many of the country’s petrochemical facilities – pulled out in 2010.

Iran’s Minister of petroleum, Bijan Zangeneh, said the Middle East country plans to invest $80 billion in its petrochemical sector in the next 10 years, thus increasing the value of petrochemical products from $25 billion at present to $70 billion per year. Iran is also interested in technology transfer.

NPC said it is interested in cooperation with German firms and has defined 100 projects so far, if financing can be successfully arranged. Iranian companies and officials are also said to be interested in talking to French and Dutch chemical players. Chinese companies, including Sinopec, likewise have indicated an interest in investing in Iran's petrochemical industry.

Sanctions are expected to be lifted at the earliest by the end of 2015, following a 90-day review period starting at the end of July and adding time for verification that Iran has met requirements for dismantling its nuclear infrastructure.

“Iran has turned into a key priority for anyone involved in Middle East petrochemicals trade," Euardo van Zeller Neto of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, recently told energy and petrochemicals news service Platts. The petrochemical industry is the country’s biggest source of foreign earnings after oil.

Figures for 2014 are said to show that Iranian companies exported $14 billion worth of petrochemical products. Iran’s total petrochemical production capacity is estimated at 60 million t/y which the officials said could be doubled.

According to chemicals news service ICIS, Iran currently has 67 projects, including five world-scale crackers capable of producing 5.3 million t/year of ethylene and “significant” volumes of polymers, along with 19 million t/y of methanol and 10.7million t/y of urea. (dw)