Eurasia Press & News
Tehran has announced that it will resume drilling for oil and gas in the Caspian. It stopped such drilling in 1997 and ended its deep-water petroleum operations on that sea in 2014, but it now hopes to actively exploit the more than 600 million barrels of oil and 56.6 billion cubic meters of gas under the seabed in its sector of the Caspian.
In making this announcement, the Iranian oil ministry said that it was open to international cooperation and investment, an indication that this new effort will be expensive and that Iran by itself will have a difficult time achieving its goals (https://casp-geo.ru/iran-vozobnovil-burenie-na-kaspii-spustya-30-let/).
This move is likely to create conflicts between Iran, on the one hand, and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, on the other, which already have developed Caspian fields near where the Iranians plan to drill (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/05/azerbaijan-expanding-naval-cooperation.html); and it may prompt Tehran to finally ratify the 2018 convention on the division of the sea to defend its claims (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/07/moscow-tries-to-work-around-tehrans.html).
In both cases, it is likely that Iran will seek to expand its naval capacities there, possibly with the help of the Russian Federation, something that will further exacerbate tensions on the Caspian (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/12/iran-launches-new-flagship-for-its.html and jamestown.org/program/russias-caspian-flotilla-no-longer-only-force-that-matters-there/).
