South Pars fire contained; 17 workers in good condition

By Elena Vasquez

All 17 workers were in good condition after a Tuesday fire on an offshore gas platform in South Pars Phase 14, a unit that accounts for 14.5 million cubic metres of the field’s daily gas output.

The Pars Oil and Gas Company said the fire broke out Tuesday and was extinguished immediately, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported. The company’s account did not identify a cause, and Fars said officials were still considering two possibilities.

What happened at Phase 14?

Kourosh Dehghan, Bushehr Province’s director general of crisis management, gave Fars an initial account of the emergency response. He said: “During the incident, 17 workers jumped into the sea to save their lives; rescue operations for them are currently underway.”

That statement placed the rescue at sea and left the workers’ condition unsettled when Dehghan spoke. He added: “Further details regarding the scale of the incident and the condition of the workers will be announced later.”

Bushehr’s crisis management office then provided the update. All 17 workers were in good condition after boarding lifeboats and rescue craft, the office said. It also said three heavy rescue vessels had been sent to the platform to bring them back.

The sequence runs from an initial marine rescue to a later report that every worker had reached rescue craft. The fire itself was immediately extinguished, leaving the worker response as the continuing element of the incident when Dehghan made his first statement.

The personnel outcome was clear: all 17 workers were in good condition after reaching rescue craft.

How significant is the affected platform?

Across South Pars as a whole, Fars put daily gas production at more than 700 million cubic metres. That comparison places the incident on one producing unit within what the report describes as the world’s largest offshore natural gas field.

Iran shares the reservoir with major gas exporter Qatar, which calls its portion the North Dome. The reservoir contains an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet, or 51 trillion cubic metres, of usable gas. Fars said that volume could supply the world’s needs for 13 years.

Those figures establish the scale of the field and reservoir behind the platform. The closer operational measure remains the Phase 14 unit’s 14.5 million cubic metres of daily production, rather than the full South Pars output or the estimated gas in the shared reservoir.

Fars did not attach a wider production-loss figure to the incident. Its report also did not state whether normal platform operations had resumed, even though Pars Oil and Gas Company had said the fire was extinguished immediately. The operating status of the installation therefore remained less clear than the condition of the workers.

The Phase 14 platform contributes 14.5 million cubic metres a day within a field producing more than 700 million cubic metres.

What caused the fire?

Officials are considering either a gas leak or an operational mishap as possible causes, Fars said. Neither option was a confirmed finding, and the report did not assign responsibility for the incident.

The immediate report focused on the condition and recovery of the workers. The later crisis-management notice supplied the workers’ status, but it did not settle the origin of the fire. Pars Oil and Gas Company likewise had described immediate extinguishment without identifying a trigger.

The emergency response produced a clear outcome for personnel but not for cause. Fars’s wording identifies possible causes rather than an established mechanism, and no statement in the report selected one over the other.

An official finding on the cause remains the next item to watch.