The minister underlined that Syria's oil and gas infrastructure has been seriously damaged by the terrorist groups supported by a coalition of nations, particularly in the systems of pumping facilities and equipment.
Despite that difficult situation, we have had the capacity to keep, above all, the supply of gas that has allowed, although with limitations and at specific times, generating power, he noted.
In 2011, when the current crisis broke out in Syria, the country produced nearly 390,000 barrels of oil a day, thus meeting most part of the demand and even exporting byproducts.
At present, production does not exceed 50,000 barrels a day, so an additional effort has to be made to import, and the positive commercial rules followed by Syria in its economic development have been altered.
The attacks and sabotages by the terrorist groups have focused since the beginning on the regions of Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, Hasaka and Homs, where Syria's main oil fields are located. Likewise, they operated against supply centers and an oil pipeline that carried fuel from those zones to the refineries in Homs and Banias, in the south and east, respectively.
Strategically, it was an action led and planned from abroad, with support from the United States and other regional governments to make Syria implode as a politically- and economically-stable nation.
In Homs, the capital of the province of the same name, some 160 kilometers northwest of Damascus and occupied again by the Syrian Army, the first refinery built in the country in the 1980s was seriously damaged and its restoration poses a first-level production challenge
There is only one refinery, the one in Banias, in the Mediterranean province of Tartus, which refines most of the country's scarce production and the imported oil.
The efforts being made by the government and the Syrian Oil Company are aimed at resuming the appropriate balance that will allow fulfilling development plans and programs in 2016, which were suddenly cut by the war imposed on the country.
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PL-69/MNA