Speaking with Shana, Abbas Zaraanejad said the institute plans to create these centers with the aim of understanding the challenges and providing solutions.

He said that House of Gas was created three years ago to study the future trends and examine the challenges the natural gas sector faces adding this year, during Iran’s Oil Show 2024 early this month, “we managed to sign two memoranda of understandings on creating similar strategic studies centers for the National Petrochemical Company (NPC) and the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC), known as House of Petrochemicals and House of Refining and Distribution.”

“By creating these centers, cooperation between IIES and 4 main subsidiaries of the Petroleum Ministry will become systematic, permanent and based on a process.” He said.

According to Zaraanejad these houses will work based on two approaches of up-down and vice versa. He continued: Based on the up-down approach, the subsidiaries will announce their needs to conducting research and studies about the challenges they face and IIES will provide them with appropriate suggestions and solutions which is a kind of problem-solving method. 

The IIES official said that based on the second approach it is believed that the subsidiaries are overwhelmed by operational and executive issues so that they have not enough time to get involved in research and study. Based on this down-up approach, the IIES acts as a monitoring center, conducting surveys about the challenges these companies will face in the future, acting as a kind of rapid warning system.

Given the earlier negotiations, we are pursuing creating the strategic studies center for the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) very seriously, hoping to establish it in near future in the IIES.