Qatar has called on Iran to form a bilateral joint technical committee to coordinate gas production from the world’s largest gas field that lies across the maritime border of the two countries.

Doha and Tehran have both carried out major developments over the last 15 years at the giant field – known as the North field in Qatar and the South Pars field in Iran – but there has been little cooperation between their respective gas production operations.

Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh told reporters at an oil and gas conference in Tehran on 6 May that Qatari officials have called for a committee to coordinate the volume of gas output from the field, according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.

Zanganeh said that they had agreed to establish a committee 13 years ago but Qatar had abandoned the idea as its gas developments raced ahead of Iran in terms of adding production capacity.

Qatar put a moratorium on further developments at the North field in 2005, which in April Qatar Petroleum (QP) announced would be lifted as it plans a new project. QP said that the moratorium was to carry out studies on the field to assess its potential for further production growth, something that could be potentially be improved through coordination with Iran.

In the intervening years Iran has carried out an ambitious $100bn programme to develop its own gas capacity, which now stands at more than 15 billion cubic feet a day (cf/d) compared with Qatar’s 20 billion cf/d.

The North Field, known as the South Pars field in Iran, covers an area of 9,700 square kilometres, of which 6,000 sq km is in Qatari territory and 3,700 sq km in Iran.

The Iranian section of the field contains 14 trillion cubic meters of gas and 18 billion barrels of condensates, according to official estimates.