50% increase in gasoline consumption over 5 years / Increasing prices will not solve the problem

According to Energy Press, Saeed Tajik, regarding the energy imbalance, said: There is an energy index called energy intensity, according to which it is clear that the intensity of energy consumption per unit of GDP is not a desirable situation for the country and is almost twice the global average. Iran is even among the lowest in the region. This is because we have not had a desirable economic growth trend in the past few years.
60% increase in gas consumption in 10 years
Stating that in the gas sector, our gas consumption has increased by about 60% in the past 10 years, from about 500 million cubic meters to more than 800 million cubic meters, he said: Also, in the gasoline sector, we have increased from 80 million liters to more than 125 million liters in the past five years; that is, we have increased by about more than 50%; while our car and motorcycle fleet has increased by almost 25%. These show that the consumption trend in the country is not desirable.
According to him, this situation in the water and electricity sectors is not so catastrophic. We consume almost as much water as the world average and our electricity consumption is about 17% more than the world consumption. However, the problem in the gas and fuel consumption sector, including gasoline and diesel, is that there are several serious complications, and for this reason we can say that we are among the high-consumption countries.
We consume more than 11 times the world average of gas
A member of the Iranian Chamber of Representatives stated that we consume gas almost 11 times the world average in the household, commercial and small industries, and that is because of the past policies that various governments had to develop the gas supply network, and said: “If a more correct policy were to be adopted, it would have been that we should have sent one energy to people’s homes, but we sent both gas and electricity, so the cost became very high, hence the consumption increased.”
Tajik continued: While it would have been better to take gas to power plants and convert it into electricity and bring electricity to people’s homes, this did not happen, and at a time when it was felt that Iran was the world’s gas reservoir and could be a gas exporter in the world, such a wrong policy upset all the equations.
He stated that, for example, about 46 percent of gas consumption is in the household, commercial, and major industries, and 9 percent of all gas is in the petrochemical sector, of which half of this 9 percent is consumed for their own energy and the other half is used as feed for petrochemicals, and approximately 30 percent of the country’s petrochemical capacity is empty because we do not have gas.
This energy expert emphasized that our gas consumption is actually in this situation, not only for the people; Because the policies that have been adopted and the devices that we have provided for people to use have led to a growing increase in consumption, he said: “For example, we have provided people with heaters with very low efficiency. So that in rural commercial and residential units, they burn gas 24 hours a day, morning and night, and the pleasure of heat and warmth is provided to people with low efficiency.”