Iran's Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari said on Saturday that gasoline rationing scheme has helped the country to curb the consumption as much as 20 million liters a day, Iran's Energy and Oil Information Network (SHANA) reported.
"The country has consumed 65 to 67 million liters per day of gasoline since the outset of the current Iranian year (starting from March 20, 2008)," Nozari told SHANA.
"A daily 20-million-litre decrease has been the consequence of implementing rationing scheme," he said.
He pointed out that the government has no plan to curb the quotas during the winter time, according to SHANA.
Nozari had already said that some 4 billion U.S. dollars had been saved from the beginning of the rationing scheme which started in June 2007.
He also explained that before running the scheme, the country imported 35 million litres of gasoline everyday to meet the demand.
Under Iran's gasoline rationing system, motorists are allowed to buy 120 liters per month at the price of 1,000 Rials (around 10U.S. cents) per liter.
Iran is the world's fourth-largest exporter of crude oil but due to the lavish consumption of heavily subsidized fuel by Iranian drivers, the country cannot meet the domestic gasoline needs, and is forced to import large amounts which it then sells very cheaply at the pump, burdening the budget.
To urge Iranians to cut their consumption, Iran's government started rationing gasoline in June 2007.
To encounter the Westerners' potential plan of targeting Iranian gasoline imports "in fresh economic sanctions", Wall Street Journal observes in its late October report that, Iran "is scrambling to boost its refining capacity and tamp down domestic demand."
"U.S. and United Nations sanctions aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear program have pushed up costs and slowed down some projects in Tehran's 16-billion-dollar effort to double domestic refining capacity," the Journal quotes Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, a top adviser to Iran's oil minister as saying.
"The first new Iranian refinery is slated to come online in 2011, but, Seyed Gholamhossein Hassantash, an energy analyst in Tehran, said he doubts it will be finished by then because of a lack of domestic capacity constraints."
Source: Xinhua
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