Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 18
By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:
The receipts of Azerbaijan's State Oil Fund (SOFAZ) from the project on development of the Shah Deniz gas and condensate field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea since 2007 stood at $2.122 billion as of Feb. 1, 2015, SOFAZ told Trend.
SOFAZ said it received $2.6 million in January 2015 as part of the Shah Deniz project.
The contract for development of the Shah Deniz offshore field was signed on June 4, 1996. The field's reserve is estimated at 1.2 trillion cubic meters of gas.
The shareholders are BP, operator (28.8 percent), Statoil (15.5 percent), NICO (10 percent), Total (10 percent), Lukoil (10 percent), TPAO (9 percent) and SOCAR (16.7 percent). These percentages include the recent purchases of equity from Statoil by BP and SOCAR.
Earlier, Total entered into an agreement to sell its interest in Shah Deniz to TPAO. After the transaction is over, the share of the latter in the project will be 19 percent.
Moreover, Norway's Statoil sold its 15.5-percent share in the Shah Deniz project to the Malaysian Petronas oil and gas company. The transactions on the sale and purchase of shares haven't been completed yet.
The State Oil Fund was created in 1999 and its assets were $271 million that time.
The assets of SOFAZ increased by 3.42 percent and exceeded $37.104 billion as of Jan.1, 2015, compared to early 2014 (nearly $35.878 billion).
Under SOFAZ's regulations, its funds may be used for the construction and reconstruction of strategically important infrastructure facilities, as well as solving important national problems.
The main goals of the State Oil Fund include: accumulation of resources and the placement of the fund's assets abroad in order to minimize the negative affect on the economy, the prevention of "Dutch disease" to some extent, promotion of resource accumulation for future generations and support of current social and economic processes in Azerbaijan.
Edited by CN
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