BASF, Linde mull massive Iran investment

TEHRAN – German chemical company BASF is weighing an investment of $4 billion in Iran, the daily Handelsblatt has reported, citing industry sources. 
Together with an Iranian company, BASF wants to build new petrochemical plants near Iran’s hub of petrochemical activities and gas industry in Assaluyeh, the paper said. BASF signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Iranian Oil Company about future cooperation in April, Press TV reported.
The German company has been in business with Iran since 1959. In addition to a sales office in Tehran, BASF maintains a polyurethane system house for production of plastics northwest of the capital, but its operation is currently very limited.
However, BASF is not the only group that was negotiating with the Iranians, the paper said.
Industry sources said Munich gas manufacturer Linde was interested in investment worth billions of dollars in the Iranian petrochemical industry jointly with the Japanese Mitsui Group. According to Handelsblatt, Linde CEO Wolfgang Büchele has been in “pre-business talks” with the Iranians for some time. Neither BASF nor Linde commented on the report, the paper said. Iran wants to use its huge reserves of raw materials to establish itself as the largest supplier of basic chemicals in the Persian Gulf.
“We will continue to expand our petrochemical capacity in the next decade from 60 million to 160 million tons per year,” Marzieh Shahdaei, head of the National Petrochemical Company of Iran (NPC), told the newspaper.
Last week, Shahdaei told a conference in Berlin that Iran needed $55 billion for 60 projects in the petrochemicals sector over a period of 10 years. The country cannot raise this sum itself and therefore seeks investors mainly from Europe, she said. In February, Shahdaei had said Linde and Mitsui Chemicals planned $4 billion of investment in Iranian petrochemical projects.