Last week, as the unrest in Iran grew more heated, I emailed Peter Wells, a British-born geologist, to get his perspective. Wells has three decades of experience in the global oil industry and during his career, he has visited Iran numerous times. Given his long experience in Iran and his deep understanding of the country’s complex political situation, I asked him for his read on the situation.

I also asked him for his analysis of the recent deals that Iran has made with China and the pending gas deal with Pakistan. Wells, who’s now based in Dubai, is a founder and director of Neftex, an oil consulting firm. Readers of Energy Tribune may be familiar with Wells. I profiled him and the work he has done for Toyota on peak oil last December. That article is available here. Below is Wells’ entire response to my questions. I made a handful of minor edits for style and clarity.

The Islamic government system and its leadership are suffering a crisis of legitimacy not seen since the Iranian revolution some 30 years ago.

Firstly, this is the first time a presidential election has been claimed to have been rigged on this scale in Iran. The scale of the turn out seems to have been aimed at a popular unseating Ahmadi-Nejad. Ahmadi-Nejad was reported to have implausibly won in his rival’s home areas (West Azerbaijan for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Lurestan for Mehdi Karroubi). Ahmadi-Nejad was also reported to have comfortably won in Tehran – again implausibly. An Iranian friend of mine agreed with the description of the election as a “coup d’etat”. Ahmadi-Nejad and his supporters in the volunteer militia (Basij) and some of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are alleged by his opponents to have stage managed the result.

Secondly, the protest is broad-based and not just made up of a few students and it is in support of candidates who are themselves scions of the revolution.

The outcome depends on the scale and sustainability of the street protests and the decisions of the Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Over the past four years he has built a new powerbase using Ahmadi-Nejad and the Basij-IRGC. Previously, he had been dependent on the revolutionary clerics and Bazaaris who had supported Ayatollah Khomenei. When Khamenei was anointed Supreme Leader in 1989, they saw him as a malleable puppet. Since 2000, he has gradually shaken off these constraints – and financially backed his little known protégé Ahmadi-Nejad in the 2005 presidential election. There is an issue of how much each man needs the other — but this will only be played out if Ahmadi-Nejad remains as president. The “old guard” of the revolutionary generation, who have become increasingly hostile to Ahmadi-Nejad, sense that their power will wane considerably if the election result stands — hence we have a third element to the “protest,” senior clergy and bazaaris [merchants] leaning towards opposing the election result (exemplified by the “Shark” himself, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani).

Rafsanjani heads up not just the Expediency Council but also the Assembly of Experts — a body whose main purpose is to elect a new Supreme Leader when the old one dies or becomes incapacitated. It also has the rather ill-defined “power” to oversee the performance of the Leader. Could this arcane body play a significant political role?

A further element in the offing is the possibility that some leading clerics in Qom could issue fatwas (religious edicts) declaring the election void. Whilst these would not have the force of law, they would give an important clerical legitimacy to the protests. Ahmadi-Nejad has few friends in high places in Qom.

Both Khamenei and the opposition are playing a high stakes game. To keep his new-found powerbase and preserve his authority, Khamenei has chosen to emphatically back Ahmadi-Nejad and the flawed elections. The opposition leadership has stood equally firm in demanding a fresh election.

My guess, and it is a guess, is that Khamenei will try to crush the opposition by intimidation – arrests of the leaders, use of vigilante groups, shows of force etc. With this all-or-nothing approach, the outcome depends on the ability of the regime to sustain the heavy use of force against a large number of civilians. If this strategy fails, the regime itself is in jeopardy. If it succeeds and the opposition fizzles out, its leaders, including Rafsanjani, are severely weakened for years to come — and the country risks regression to the dark and grim days of the 1980s. It is hard to see the young, energized, educated, and increasingly middle class Iranian population putting up with sustained repression. Social explosions would be inevitable with the constant need and internally corrosive use of force against civilians.

The oil and gas deals with foreign companies are side issues. Given US and UN sanctions, Iran has little choice but to award contracts to Chinese companies. This will not change whatever the outcome of the current political stand-off. Iran has a very good record of honoring foreign contractual obligations. The gas export pipeline to Pakistan is a strategic use of Iran’s gas as well as a means of generating jobs and wealth. No one would want to cancel this. Iran would much rather do business with US, UK, and European companies than Asian companies, but this is not a viable option. Some of the imperative for the deals is political (aimed at buying support), but it is also to obtain investment and access to markets.

The South Pars gas field has been under development since 1997 with several foreign oil companies involved – Total, ENI, and Statoil. In mid-2009, gas production capacity from South Pars had reached some 9 billion cubic feet per day. This is pretty much Qatar’s planned output from 2010.