TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran has discovered a new oil field in the country's south with more than 50 billion barrels of crude, Iran's president said Sunday, a find that stands to boost the country's proven reserves by a third as it struggles to sell energy abroad in the face of U.S. sanctions.
The announcement by President Hassan Rouhani comes as Iran faces crushing American sanctions after the U.S. pulled out of its nuclear deal with world powers last year.
Iran also began pouring concrete for a second nuclear power plant Sunday, further straying from the 2015 nuclear power deal.
Rouhani made the oil find announcement in a speech in the desert city of Yazd. He said the field was in Iran's southern Khuzestan province, home to its crucial oil industry.
Some 53 billion barrels would be added to Iran's proven reserves of roughly 150 billion, he said.
"I am telling the White House that in the days when you sanctioned the sale of Iranian oil and pressured our nation, the country's dear workers and engineers were able to discover 53 billion barrels of oil in a big field," Rouhani said.
Oil reserves refer to crude that's economically feasible to extract. Figures can vary wildly by country because of differing standards, though it remains a yardstick of comparison among oil-producing nations.
Iran currently has the world's fourth-largest proven deposits of crude oil and the world's second-largest deposits of natural gas. It shares a large offshore field in the Persian Gulf with Qatar.
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The new site could become Iran's second-largest field after one containing 65 billion barrels in Ahvaz. The field is 925 square miles, with the deposit some 260 feet deep, Rouhani said.
Since the U.S. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, the other countries involved -- Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China -- have been struggling to save it. However, they've offered no means by which Iran can sell its oil abroad.
Any company or government that buys Iran's oil faces harsh U.S. sanctions, the threat of which also stopped billions of dollars in business deals and sharply depreciated Iran's currency, the rial.
Iran has since gone beyond the deal's stockpile and enrichment limits, as well as started using advanced centrifuges barred by the deal. It also just began injecting uranium gas into centrifuges at an underground facility.
ENRICHMENT, STOCKPILES
While celebrating the start of construction of a second nuclear reactor at its Bushehr power plant, Iranian officials pointed to U.S.-led oil sanctions as its reason for breaking enrichment limits set in the unraveling nuclear deal.
"It was not us who started breaking commitments, it was them who did not keep to their commitments and cannot accept the nuclear deal as a one-way road map," said Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
Bushehr is fueled by uranium produced in Russia, not Iran, and is monitored by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency. However, Iran began 4.5% enrichment in part to supply Bushehr despite the deal limiting it to 3.67%.
While that's still nowhere near weapons-grade levels of 90%, nonproliferation experts warn Iran's growing stockpile and increasing enrichment will begin to shave off time from the estimated year Tehran would need to gather enough material for an atomic bomb.
Iran long has maintained its program is for peaceful purposes, though the deal was designed to limit its enrichment program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. Those limits blocked its path to being able to have enough material for a bomb.
On Sunday, trucks with spinning concrete mixers poured their slurry into the prepared base of the second reactor as journalists watched in Bushehr, some 440 miles south from Iran's capital, Tehran. Bushehr's working reactor stands behind it.
Officials say the new reactor, and a third planned to be built, will each add over 1,000 megawatts to Iran's power grid. It is being built with the help of Russia, which helped finally put Bushehr's first reactor online in 2011 after decades of delays.
Salehi, speaking to reporters, praised the plant's operations.
"The security of this power plant has been provided by the armed forces and its safety has been endorsed by international institutions," he said.
That appeared to be a dig at Gulf Arab states opposed to Tehran that earlier raised concerns to the International Atomic Energy Agency that Bushehr was a risk to the wider region over earthquakes that routinely hit Iran. The facility withstood earthquakes in the past and is built to resist damage from a temblor.
Salehi also offered Iran's help to neighboring Arab nations, noting the United Arab Emirates' nuclear power plant in Barakah had seen years of delays.
Meanwhile Sunday, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi rejected claims by the U.S. and Israel that nuclear material was discovered at an undeclared site outside Tehran. An agency meeting last week appeared to include discussions about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described in a United Nations speech in 2018 as a "secret atomic warehouse."
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said Iran "carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device" in a "structured program" through the end of 2003. Israeli officials allege material recovered from the warehouse came from that program.
"The Zionist regime and others are trying to reopen this case. We don't accept this and we condemn these efforts," Mousavi said. "Reopening a case which has been already resolved and closed is not compatible with any laws, regulations or agreements."
Iran previously has denied the claims about the warehouse by Israel, which has its own undeclared nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency released no information on the alleged warehouse at a board meeting Thursday, but is expected to release a quarterly report on the Iran nuclear deal this week.
Information for this article was contributed by Mohsen Ganji, Amir Vahdat and Jon Gambrell of The Associated Press
A Section on 11/11/2019