Iran's Deputy Oil Minister says the SPD14D platform at South Pars caught fire a few minutes ago; situation is under control and cause is under investigation, reports Fars

• This platform produces 14.5 million cubic meters of South Pars' more than 700 million cubic meters of gas.
• The cause of the incident is under investigation and 2 possibilities of gas leakage or operational incident are on the table.

Fires on offshore platforms are a recurring event class, and the established pattern is that the initial reaction is driven by the platform's share of field output and the export route at risk, not the incident itself. South Pars is the giant offshore gas field shared with Qatar, but Iranian production from it flows almost entirely into the domestic pipeline network rather than into LNG export markets, since sanctions and infrastructure constraints have long kept Iran out of seaborne gas trade. On the figures given, the affected platform is a small single-digit share of the field's total output, which in comparable episodes has meant limited physical effect even if the unit is down for a period. The first tell in past incidents of this kind has been the cause: an operational fault or gas leak points to a contained outage, while any suggestion of external interference against Iranian energy infrastructure has historically carried a different risk premium, particularly through crude and tanker insurance rather than gas itself. Confirmation from official channels on cause and expected downtime is the next signal, with the crude complex the more sensitive spillover channel if attribution turns hostile.