TEHRAN, May 5 (UPI) -- Iran announced plans for the construction of a $400 million offshore oil platform in its territorial waters in the Caspian Sea.
Tehran pegged expansion of oil exploration in its Caspian waters as a top national priority. There are at least 17 billion barrels of estimated crude reserves in the Caspian Sea.
Prior to leaving for energy talks with Berlin, Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said the platform would explore Caspian oil reserves at a depth of around 3,280 feet, Press TV reports.
Iran Marine Industrial Co. along with Swiss partners won construction rights from the National Iranian Oil Co. for the platform, Iran-Alborz, in 2002.
Nozari said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would inaugurate the project in "the coming weeks."
Iran moved to expand its footprint in the Caspian in 2008 with plans to develop the Bandar-e Anzali Free Trade and Industrial Zone, a complex of docks including industrial, trade, tourism and service zones in an effort to ease pressure from Western-backed economic sanctions.
Iran, meanwhile, has contested demarcations in the Caspian Sea from the Soviet era that stipulate Iran controls about 12 percent of those waters.
The Caspian Sea's littoral states are at odds over a 1921 treaty that divided the region between Iran and the Soviet Union. Tehran says its ownership is closer to 20 percent.
