Iran's energy sector review

Japan Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida's will start visiting Iran on November 9, a day after finishing nuclear talks between Iran and P5+1 in Geneva, which kicked off on Thursday. This is first visit of a Japanese foreign minister to Iran since January 2004, when Ms. Yoriko Kawaguchi visited Iran for the second time during Mohammad Khatami's presidency. Before, her predecessor Masahiko Koumura visited Iran in 1998 as well. However, during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's eight-year presidency, no Japanese ministers visited Iran, but only Prime Minister Fukuda and President Ahmadinejad met on the occasion of the World Food Summit in Rome 2008. Ahmadinejad's predecessor Khatami had visited Japan accompanied by Kamal Kharrazi, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Bijan Zanganeh, Minister of Petroleum in 2000. Iran-Japan trade turnover had almost tripled since 1990 until 2011, reaching from $5.1 bln to above $14 bln, but Japan's accompany with Western sanctions over Iran led to

Iran 's Mohammad-Hossein Adeli was elected on Sunday as the new secretary general of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum for a two-year term. Iran proposed the establishment of a gas cartel, dubbed sometimes as the "gas OPEC", in 2001. The country hosted conferences and meeting to materialize the idea, which was finally achieved in 2009. The mission of a cartel is to coordinate the policies to secure a steady income to the member states, define and set outputs and prices, and to secure supply of goods to the consumers. OPEC is a good example of such a cartel. Some gas exporting countries such as Qatar and Russia were not in favor of establishing a gas cartel, to be used as a political tool, therefore the idea could not be materialized. On October 21, 2009, the gas exporting countries consented to change Iran 's proposed name of "gas cartel" to the "Gas Exporting Countries Forum" and turned the mission of that totally deferent from what Iran