Speaking at a
meeting on expanding public participation in natural gas management through
aggregators, Zeraatkar said the residential, commercial and major industrial
sectors still had significant market potential and were far from saturation.
He said one
strategy for advancing the sector was to make greater use of the media to
highlight the efforts already undertaken, noting that even the term “Nabz
Energy” remains unfamiliar to many people.
“Valuable
measures have been taken in hospitals and other public facilities, and
considerable efforts have been made, but they have not received adequate
coverage,” Zeraatkar said, according to Shana. He added that professional media
outlets had paid limited attention to the sector, while the achievements
reported so far represented only a small part of its potential.
Zeraatkar
said a coordinated working group had yet to be established to follow up on the
sector’s issues, which had contributed to its capacities and challenges
receiving insufficient attention.
He called for
a shift in the way gas aggregators are viewed, from contractors to investors
and partners, saying activities should increasingly be managed through networks
rather than traditional linear approaches.
“Demands and
challenges must be communicated; otherwise, restricting activities to
administrative frameworks will make further progress more difficult,” he said.
Zeraatkar
also attributed some of the shortcomings in fuel-consumption optimization to a
theoretical approach to the issue. He said one of the key tasks was to localize
international knowledge and turn it into practical solutions, noting that
conditions in Iran differed from those in Europe and that some international
models could not be implemented directly.
The Planning
Deputy Petroleum Minister said senior authorities expected the Petroleum Ministry
to play a facilitating role in its engagement with gas aggregators. Such
facilitation, he added, should nevertheless be structured in a way that allowed
for technical and legal justification.
Iran has an
opportunity before the onset of colder weather to support the National Iranian
Gas Company and establish effective engagement with 4 million to 5 million
high-consumption customers, Zeraatkar said.
He identified
the lack of a unified and foundational platform as one of the sector’s main
challenges, saying a centralized data-governance platform was needed to
establish unified command and that traditional methods were no longer
sufficient.
Zeraatkar
also stressed the need to improve public awareness about energy consumption,
saying many people were not sufficiently aware of the direct links among water,
electricity and gas consumption.
He said a
public campaign to reduce gas consumption was being launched gradually, adding
that the media would have a key role by promoting consumption-reduction
solutions and highlighting the efforts of those active in the field.
Such efforts,
he said, could contribute to achieving broader goals for energy-consumption
management.