Iran says ability to sell oil freely key to JCPOA talks

Any breakthrough in the negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal will have to include guarantees that Tehran will again be able to sell its oil and repatriate its revenues freely, Iran's foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said today.

"The most important issue for us is to get to the point where, first and foremost, Iran's oil is sold easily and without restrictions, and the proceeds are able to be transferred in foreign currency to Iran's bank accounts," Amir-Abdollahian said. "We should be given access to all the economic benefits promised to Tehran under the deal," he said.

Amir-Abdollahian was speaking ahead of the start of a new round of talks in Vienna today aimed at reviving the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the US unilaterally exited in 2018 before reimposing economic sanctions on Iran's economy and its oil sector. The previous round of talks, the seventh since the start of negotiations in April, ended on 15 December.

This eighth round will be focus on "a common and acceptable" text that Iran and its partners to the 2015 JCPOA agreed on at that previous round, Amir-Abdollahian said, which supersedes anything that was prepared during earlier rounds of discussions when former Iranian president Hassan Rohani was still in office. "We put aside the June 2020 document, and now have common and acceptable documents covering both nuclear and sanctions-related issues on which our negotiations will be based," he said.

The talks in Vienna are conducted with intermediaries between the US and Iran, who have yet to meet face to face since the talks resumed under US president Joe Biden. His predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew from the deal in 2018 after which Tehran began to gradually dial back its compliance with its commitments. US officials say they remain concerned that Iran's progress in its nuclear programme has brought it closer to a theoretical threshold when it could have enough enriched uranium for a functional nuclear weapon. Iran has long denied it has any intention of building or possessing nuclear weapons.

A restoration of the nuclear deal in its original form could add up to 1.4mn b/d of Iranian crude oil to global supply. But given the drawn out process that the talks have become, it is unlikely that this will happen even with a successful outcome, before the second half of 2022. Argus estimates Iran's crude production slipped by 10,000 b/d month-on-month to 2.46mn b/d in November, well below the 3.8mn b/d or so it was producing in early 2018 before the reimposition of US sanctions.

By Adal Mirza and Nader Itayim