Investigating the Impact of Sanctions on Expenditures on Development of South Pars Gas Field: Comparing Internal Contractors with Foreign Contractors

Projects are affected by many internal and external factors, which could be initiated domestically or internationally. The South Pars as a mega gas field in Iran requires billions of dollars for development and gas extraction. Its development has taken a rather long time and faced many challenges over the last two decades due to several problems, especially international barriers. In this work, the effects of sanctions on the expenditure on selected activities in developing South Pars field are investigated to compare internal contractors with foreign contractors. The main purpose of this research is to calculate the cost of the selected activities of South Pars phases and compare the performance of the internal contractors under sanctions conditions with that of the foreign contractors under normal (when no sanctions are imposed on Iran) conditions. For this purpose, 18 activities, which were similar in all South Pars contracts, were selected. In three sections, after applying relative indices, global inflation, and technology by using inferential statistics, the total cost of the selected activities done by the internal and foreign contractors was evaluated . Based on the statistical analysis, there was no significant difference between the expenditure on the selected activities performed by the internal contractors and foreign contractors under sanctions.