Iran Website Says Oil Revenues Up With, Or Without A Nuclear Deal

According to videos published on social media, retirees took to the streets in several cities such as Kerman, Karaj, Zanjan, Arak, Shush, Shushtar, and Ahvaz to protest against the Raisi administration for pushing in parliament a much smaller increase of only 10 percent while the latest inflation rate figure stands at 55 percent.

They say the administration’s decision to increase pensions by 10 percent is "illegal" and "unfair".

Denouncing President Ebrahim Raisi and his government, the pensioners chanted slogans such as "Parliament, government; both lie to the nation."

Retirees are demanding pension increases in par with rising prices of essential foods, saying that the current payments are not in line with decrees by the Supreme Labor Council, which had stipulated a 38-percent increase in the minimum wage.

With food prices rising faster after four years of United States’ ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Iranian workers and retirees have been holding regular protests or strikes to demand higher salaries. Last month, Iran’s currency fell to a historic low of 333,000 rials to the US dollar in June.

During the past weeks, widespread protests by workers,shop owners, and teachers protesting against poverty, inflation, and low wages, have been met with heavy-handed crackdown and numerous arrests by the security forces.

In an article by economy writer Maryam Shokrani on Saturday [July 2], Shargh reported that China has already opened a letter of credit for the project and will complete the payment of the 15-billion-yuan loan until 2024.

The loan is scheduled to be repaid until 2029 and the interest charged will boost Iran’s debt to almost 22 billion yuan, or $3.2 billion.

The reformist paper, which is relatively independent from the government, although under the rules of censorship in Iran says that the project has little economic justification, as passenger rail service in the country is a money loser. Instead, vital economic railway projects in the north and in the south-east have been languishing for years.

As an example, the report mentions a planned railway connection between the Arabian Sea port of Chabahar and the city of Zahedan Sistan-Baluchistan province. Iran has been hoping that the port will boost transit of goods not only for its local market but also to other countries. India made investments in the development of Chabahar with the hope of avoiding Pakistan in shipping goods to Iran, Afghanistan and other countries to the north.

Shargh argues that as has been the case in many other less-developed countries, China is in the business of financing similar projects and if repayment in cash proves difficult, it takes oil and minerals instead.

Iran’s foreign and international trade policies have tilted toward China in the last decade, following a policy of ‘looking East’ espoused by the country’s ruler, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Tehran inked a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing last year, which has proven controversial among some Iranians.

The issue is that Tehran has been quite consistent in following an anti-West and an anti-Israel foreign policy in the Middle East, supporting a variety of militant organizations, developing ballistic missiles and pursuing a nuclear program. This first brought about international sanctions from 2007-2015 and then United States crippling sanctions in 2018.

The restrictive measures have considerably weakened its economy and mostly eliminated infrastructure development projects.

A former Iranian railway official, Mahmoud Heshmati told Shargh that the Qom-Esfahan fast train project has no economic justification. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have launched limited speed trains, but they are countries that serve millions of foreign visitors, while international tourism in Iran is negligible.

Iran, which before the establishment of the Islamic Republic was a popular destination for Westerners in the 1960s and 70s, now has only small groups of international visitors. There are two major reasons. One is strict Islamic rules such as hijab for women, and a ban on alcoholic drinks and the other is years of arbitrary arrests of foreign visitors for purposes of exchanging prisoners with Europe, the United States, and even Australia.

Another former official told Shargh that the Qom-Esfahan project has a 16-year history, but successive government hesitated because of a host of technical challenges. There was no need to take a loan from China, which would be hard to repay with its high interest.

The former official argued that private Iranian capital played a major role in economic development in the United Arab Emirates and other regional countries, while it stays away from Iran. “The reason is that domestic investors are pressured in Iran,” he said. But for the Chinese, it is just the opposite.

A magnitude 6.1 earthquake hit Iran’s Hormozgan province, with the area hit soon after by two strong quakes of up to 6.3 magnitude.

Some 24 tremors, two with a magnitude of 6.3 and 6.1, followed the 2 a.m. local time quake that flattened the village of Sayeh Khosh near Iran's Persian Gulf coast. The most recent tremor occurred around 8 a.m., officials told state TV.

"All of the victims died in the first earthquake and no-one was harmed in the next two severe quakes as people were already outside their homes," said Foad Moradzadeh, governor of Bandar Lengeh country, quoted by the state news agency IRNA.

Emergency services spokesperson Mojtaba Khaledi told state TV that half of the 49 people injured had been discharged from hospitals.

Saeid Pourzadeh of the Kish island crisis task force said shipping and flights in that part of the Persian Gulf had not been affected by the quakes.

State TV said 150 quakes and tremors had struck western Hormozgan over the past month.

Major geological fault lines crisscross Iran, which has suffered several devastating earthquakes in recent years. In 2003, a magnitude 6.6 quake in Kerman province killed 31,000 people and flattened the ancient city of Bam.

Iranian government entities have stopped publishing information on fuel use for power generation, but the latest report from the Parliament Research Center in 2020 indicted that the use of mazut had reached 6 billion liters (around 1.6 billion gallons), or 62 percent higher than in 2017.

Mazut is a heavy, dirty fuel which is banned in most countries unless it is blended with less polluting fuels, but in Iran it is used regularly as its export market is limited.

The same report indicated that power plants in 2020 used 11 billion liters of diesel, or more than double than in 2017. In the 2020-2021 winter daily natural gas shortage reached 170 cubic meters and that led to higher usage of polluting fuels.

From 2021, all government and industry sources in Iran stopped publishing figures about usage of dirty fuels in power pants, but scattered media reports indicated that natural gas shortages had started before the winter of 2021-2022, but in the cold months it reached the unprecedented deficit of 250 million cubic meters per day.

In fact, Mehr news agency in Tehran reported in late February that Iran had again become a net diesel importer for the first time since 2014, most likely because of high diesel usage for power generation.

The chronic shortage of natural gas is noteworthy in the context of recent talk about Iran possibly supplying the much-needed fuel to Europe in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In fact, Iran needs around $50 billion in investments to increase its natural gas production, although it has the world’s second largest reserves. At the time being, United States sanctions, as well as general investment risk factors make any infusion of capital and technology highly problematic, but even in the absence of such impediments, it would take years before the country can produce enough for significant exports.

Figures in the BP report show that in 2020 Iran produced 37 terawatts of its electricity from dirty fuels, but in 2021 it reached 49 terawatts. As a result, Iran’s greenhouse gas emissions reached the historic level of 893 million tons, an increase of 4.5 percent over 2020.

Iran is the sixth highest greenhouse gas contributor in the world, afterChina, the United States, India, Japan and Russia. Germany, with an 18-times bigger economy produces 28 percent less air pollution.

The BP report also indicates Iran’s nuclear electricity generation fell by 44 percent to 2.7 terawatts, and hydroelectric power generation decreased by 36 percent, due to drought.

Iran has also lagged in solar and wind energy generation. Last year it produced a combined total of 1.8-terawatt electricity from these renewables while neighboring Turkey generated 35 times more.

Nuclear, solar, and wind electricity generation constituted just over one percent of Iran’s 358 terawatts of electricity generation in 2021.

“These entities use deceptive practices to supply or attempt to supply Iran with US-origin electronics that would ultimately provide support to Iran's military,” the official journal of the federal government the Federal Register said on Thursday. 

The entities are added to the Entity List that means US suppliers need a license before they can ship items to the listed companies.

The companies were among 23 Chinese firms that were added to the trade blacklist this week, including five linked to arms sales to Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition to the five Chinese firms, companies in other countries such as Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Lithuania were identified as supplying military goods to the Russian military since February, when the war began.

Earlier in June, the US Thursday sanctioned Chinese, Emirati and Iranian firms over exporting Iran's petrochemicals in a measure aimed at pushing Iran to renew the 2015 nuclear deal.

Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said, “The United States is pursuing the path of meaningful diplomacy to achieve a mutual return to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action,” but would “continue to use our sanctions to limit exports of petroleum, petroleum products, and petrochemical products from Iran.”