Hamid Bourd Heads to Moscow to Attend GECF Summit and Ministerial Meeting

Hamid Bourd Heads to Moscow to Attend GECF Summit and Ministerial Meeting

According to a Mehr reporter, citing the Ministry of Petroleum, Hamid Bourd left this morning (Sunday, October 25) for Moscow, the capital of Russia, with the aim of accompanying Masoud Pezeshkian at the 8th Summit and also attending the 28th Ministerial Meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF).

The 28th Ministerial Meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum is scheduled to be held on Monday (October 26), that is, one day before this forum's summit is convened.

In this regard, the extraordinary meeting of the Executive Board, chaired by Seyed Ali-Mohammad Mousavi, deputy for international and commercial affairs of the Ministry of Petroleum, as well as the meeting of the High-Level (Ad hoc) board, is also being held today (Sunday, October 25), and reviewing and finalizing key documents, including the final statement of the heads, is among its main agenda items.

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum, as one of the important intergovernmental structures, provides the platform for dialogue and coordination among natural gas producing and exporting countries. The summits and ministerial meetings of this forum are held with goals such as exchanging views on developments in the gas market, examining the outlook for supply and demand, ensuring energy security, and defining the position of natural gas in the world's energy basket.

Cooperation in the field of developing the natural gas market, analyzing trends in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, and assessing investment needs to respond to future demands are among the other topics of attention at this forum.

The summit of the GECF member countries is held periodically once every two years. The first summit of this forum was held in 2011 in the city of Doha, Qatar, and after that Moscow in 2013, Tehran in 2015, Santa Cruz in Bolivia in 2017, Malabo in Equatorial Guinea in 2019, Doha in 2022 and Algiers in 2024 hosted the previous editions; just as this forum, since its establishment, has so far held 27 meetings at the ministerial level.

This forum has 12 main members, including Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, and the countries Angola, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Iraq, Malaysia, Mauritania, Mozambique, Peru and Senegal are also present in it as observer members.

Based on official statistics, the member countries of this forum together hold close to 70 percent of the world's proven natural gas reserves, 38 percent of commercial gas production and 42 percent of the world's total gas exports; meanwhile, these countries' share of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) export market is also estimated at around 47 percent.

Mohammad Hossein Seifollahi Moghaddam