Power restored in Iran oil regions

Power supply has been restored within hours of an outage in southwestern Iran that hit crude oil production by 700,000 barrels on Saturday, and efforts are underway to compensate for the output drop, a senior oil official said.

It was not immediately clear if oil exports would be affected by the electricity outages, which have been frequent in the oil-producing Khuzestan province.

Part of the output cutback in the Karoun area was planned and aimed at storing about 300,000 barrels produced by the West Karoun fields, Bijan Alipour, managing director of the National South Oil Company, said in a statement. He did not elaborate.

"As power supply has been reestablished, processing plants have resumed production according to schedule and the reduced hours will be compensated as much as possible," Alipour said in the statement, posted on the state-run company's website.

Iran produces about 3.7 million barrels per day of crude oil, some 1.5 million bpd of which are used at home.

(Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Clelia Oziel)