CEO of the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) says the gas grid in the country has expanded by 53,000 kilometers in the past three years.

According to The Iran Project, Majid Chegeni said on Sunday that Iran had built more than 1,800 kilometers of new high pressure gas transmission pipelines since August 2021 when the outgoing government took office.

Chegeni said the number of gas grid customers in Iran had increased by nearly a million over the past three years, adding that some 50 new cities and 6,800 villages had also been connected to the country’s nationwide gas pipeline network over the same period.

Natural gas became available to 24 new power plants and 21,000 industrial units across Iran over the past three years, he said, adding that the NIGC had also built seven new pumping stations with 24 compressors to power long-distance gas pipelines in the country.

Iran is one of the four largest producers and consumers of natural gas in the world. The country injects more than 850 million cubic meters per day of natural gas to its nationwide grid during cold winter months.

Total gas output in Iran has exceeded 1 billion cubic meters per day, a bulk of which comes from South Pars, the world’s largest gas field which is located on the maritime border between Iran and Qatar in the Persian Gulf.

Chegeni’s comments on Sunday came during a ceremony to inaugurate a 176-kilometer gas pipeline in eastern Iran where the NIGC has been carrying out projects to boost gas supplies to households and industries in the region.