Development projects at North Azadegan and Yadavaran are close to completion adding 160,000 barrels a day to the countrys crude oil output, a senior Iranian petroleum official said. Petroleum Engineering and Development Company (PEDEC) Abdolreza Haji-Hosseinnejad told a press conference on Saturday that the two oilfields are located west of Karoun river and are both operational and ready to be officially inaugurated. He said the two fields will be officially launched after the late February parliamentary elections. The PEDEC official said North Azadegan can produce 75,000 b/d and Yadavaran will produce 85,000 b/d. He said the gas section of Yadavaran oil field is waiting for LNG facilities to become productive. For the time being, Iran recovers 215,000 b/d of crude oil from west Karoun oilfields, Haji- Hosseinnejad said. Sanctions Hinder Projects The PEDEC chief further said development projects of the two fields were carried out on a buyback basis with Chinese investors; however, they were both completed by PEDEC because of the sanctions that banned foreign partnerships in the projects. Yadavaran is developed by an investment of $2.9b and has so far produced 50m barrels of oil of which 40m was extracted from the field in the past 24 months. The Rouhani administration took office in 2013. Yadavarans in-place oil reservoirs are nearly 31 billion barrels of light and heavy crude oil, he said. The field can produce 70,000b/d of light crude and 15,000b/d of heavy crude oil. The $2.55b North Azadegan development project is aimed at tapping 5.7b barrels of oil in-place.