All 17 crew members who jumped into the sea to escape a fire on a gas platform in Iran's South Pars field have been rescued in good condition, and the platform's lost gas output has been made up from other platforms in the field, the Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC) said in an update carried by Iran's Shana news agency on Wednesday, November 11.

Source: Shana / Pars Oil and Gas Company

The fire broke out on Tuesday, November 10, on platform SPD14D in Phase 14 of South Pars, the world's largest offshore natural gas field, which Iran shares with Qatar. POGC said the blaze was contained quickly. Kourosh Dehghan, director general of crisis management in Bushehr province, told the semi-official Fars news agency that 17 workers jumped into the sea to save their lives during the incident. Bushehr's crisis management office later said all 17 were in good condition after boarding lifeboats and rescue craft, and that three heavy rescue vessels had been sent to the platform. POGC's deputy for operations and support said the rescue was completed in adverse weather.

Source: Reuters

Output covered, cause under investigation

The affected platform accounts for about 14.5 million cubic metres of gas a day, Fars reported — Shana put the figure at 14 million cubic metres — against total South Pars production of more than 700 million cubic metres a day. POGC said the shortfall was made up using the capacity of other platforms in the field, so the fire did not cut the field's overall supply. The cause of the fire is under investigation, with a gas leak or an operational mishap among the possible causes, Fars said. Iranian officials have not linked the fire to any attack — an important point in the middle of the US–Iran war and the continuing dispute over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where any incident at Gulf energy infrastructure is watched closely by oil and gas markets.

Source: Al Jazeera

Why South Pars matters

South Pars, the offshore section of the giant field Qatar calls the North Dome, is the backbone of Iran's domestic gas supply and a key source of the country's energy income. A platform producing roughly 14 million cubic metres a day is a small share — about 2 percent — of the field's total output, which is why the loss could be absorbed by neighbouring platforms. (Yaani: 14.5 million cubic metres is about 1.45 crore cubic metres of gas every day from this one platform, out of more than 70 crore cubic metres a day from the whole field.) The incident also lands at a moment when energy markets are on edge: crude oil rebounded by more than 1 percent on Wednesday from a two-month low as uncertainty over US–Iran diplomacy and Hormuz shipping persisted, Reuters reported.

What happens next

Investigators are working to establish what ignited the blaze, and POGC is expected to detail any damage to the platform and when SPD14D can return to service. For the thousands of Indian and Punjabi workers employed across Gulf energy and shipping — and for households watching fuel prices — the reassuring facts are the ones officials have put on record: no lives lost, no supply lost, and, so far, no claim by any side that the fire was an act of war.