Technology planning system for the Iranian petroleum industry: Lessons learned from sanctions

Iran's petroleum industry is facing challenges including maturity of hydrocarbon fields, growing population of the nation that demands additional revenues from petroleum exports, and international economic sanctions that have limited access to technology sources. Restrictions from international technology providers have led managers of the industry enterprises to try to develop their needed technologies inside the country. The Ministry of Petroleum has supervised this and as a result, a technology planning systems has been developed and implemented since 2009. In this paper, an overview of the Iranian petroleum industry is provided from a technology planning perspective. The focus has been on the events and the behavior of the system after the implementation of the new technology planning system, which coincides with the period of the intensification of international sanctions against Iran. Results of the study, and a comparison between features of the technology planning systems before and after 2009 show that while the new approach has promoted the planning system from several aspects it still suffers lack of attention to two key elements of a planning system i.e. integration and alignment between different levels of planning. As a result of recognizing the necessity of an evolutionary model at the industry level to address these two factors and by reviewing experiences from several countries, a general model is proposed. The proposed model brings the two issues of integration and alignment in technology planning systems into consideration with special attention to key factors such as technology roadmaps in different industry levels, common areas of technology, soft aspects of planning, and interaction with external stakeholders. The proposed model shows a good compliance with several experiences in the Iranian petroleum industry including the development of MFL Pigs technology; the story of which is covered as a case study.