Back in March, Saudi and Iran announced they had agreed to restore diplomatic ties in a deal brokered by China, ending a seven-year rift. The Saudi Arabia-Iran deal–one of the latest in a series of geopolitical realignments that have lately been going on in the Middle East–has been widely lauded, with the U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby saying, "To the degree that this arrangement can lead to an end to the war in Yemen, to the degree that it can help prevent Saudi Arabia from having to defend itself against attacks, to the degree that could deescalate tensions - all that's to the good side of the ledger." Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran reached a fever pitch in 2019 after an assault claimed by Iran-backed Yemeni fighters on Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq facility temporarily knocked out half the production capacity. Last year, Saudi Arabia sounded the alarm for an imminent Iranian attack, eliciting a swift response from the United States. And now it has emerged that the two nations are willing to take their newfound friendship to a new level. The head of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Mohsen Khojastehmehr, has told Tasnim News Agency that preliminary work for bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the oil industry has already kicked off. The two will now explore oil and gas fields they jointly own but have neglected for years due to previous animosity.
Iran and Saudi Arabia share more than 28 oil and gas fields which have never been exploited due to disagreements in terms of the amount of exploitation and level of access. The two share Farzad A and B and Arash gas fields, with the Arash field also extending to Kuwait. The Farzad field holds ~23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and gas condensates of 5,000 barrels per billion cubic feet, while the Arash field holds ~20 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, with the potential to produce one billion cubic feet per day.