Iran Mostly Contains Fire after Southwest Oil Pipeline Spill

Firefighters have contained most of a blaze that broke out after a pipeline carrying crude oil to Iran’s second-largest refinery ruptured on Sunday because of a landslide, the head of the state company in charge of oil pipelines said. “Most of the fire ... has been contained and operations teams are repairing the damaged section of the pipeline,” Qasem Arab Yarmohammadi told the Oil Ministry’s news agency, SHANA. “Landslides have a long history in this area,” said Arab Yarmohammadi, chief executive of the Iranian Oil Pipeline and Telecommunications Company.

Khosro Kiani, an emergency official in southwestern Iran, where the blaze occurred, said earlier that the oil had spilled down a hard-to-access valley, which firefighting equipment could not reach, the semi-official news agency Tasnim reported.

The damaged Maroun pipeline feeds the Isfahan refinery, which has a capacity of about 375,000 barrels a day.

Iran’s ageing oil infrastructure has long been in need of rehabilitation, as refurbishment plans have been delayed by Western sanctions and local bureaucracy, analysts say. There have been several earlier instances of spillage from the pipeline that have adversely affected the region’s agriculture and fishing, state news agency IRNA reported.

The 30-inch Maroun-Isfahan pipeline, with six pump stations, carries about 550,000 b/d of crude from the onshore Maroun fields 430 km through the Zagros Mountains to oil refineries, local media reported. According to IRNA, 375,000 b/d go to storage tanks in Isfahan, while the remaining 175,000 b/d are sent to the Tehran and Tabriz oil refineries.

Iran's oil infrastructure has deteriorated over the past several years due to US sanctions, and the Maroun-Isfashan pipeline has a record of ruptures in the past.

There was no official indication that the incident was a sabotage. However, in the past "oil thieves" have succeeded to steal thousands of liters of oil from the pipeline. In August, local security forces caught three men while taking oil via a 3-inch valve from the pipe. In June, 67 km of the aging pipeline was replaced and some essential equipment in seven oil transfer stations was upgraded and repaired. - Reuters, Platts