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Vice-President for Exploration: Statoil to enhance activities in Caspian region

Oil&Gas Materials 27 June 2013 14:59 (UTC +04:00)
Statoil is currently demonstrating an active interest in the Caspian region, the company’s Vice President for exploration in Europe and Asia Terje Dahl told Trend in an interview at the international conference ‘Development of the Caspian shelf" in Atyrau.

Kazakhstan, Atyrau, June 25 / Trend D.Mukhtarov /

Statoil is currently demonstrating an active interest in the Caspian region, the company's Vice President for exploration in Europe and Asia, Terje Dahl told Trend in an interview at the international conference 'Development of the Caspian shelf" in Atyrau.

"Statoil is demonstrating an active interest in the Caspian region. We are going to stick to our strategy which we apply in all of our activities. The first principle is the drilling of high performance wells, the second is the use of existing positions, since oil can be found where it was found previously," Dahl said.

He noted that Norway's Statoil is present today in the Azerbaijani and Kazakh parts of the Caspian Sea. In Azerbaijan, the company has been involved since the 90s in the two projects at Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli and Shah Deniz.

"We have recently resumed large scale work in Azerbaijan. A memorandum was signed with SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan) for the joint development of the Zafar-Mashal area which is located next to Shah Deniz. We are carefully studying the structure and the whole zone, conducting seismic studies with the use of the latest technology and we are confident it has hydrocarbons," Dahl said.

According to him Statoil is also exploring possibilities of the two licence areas in Kazakhstan.

"So far we do not have licenses in Kazakhstan, but have been involved in the development of several licenses previously. Now, we have decided to slow down our activities in Kazakhstan, since we are interested in a detailed study of the regional geology. This is necessary for the distribution of all sections with regards to the potential after defining our activities here in the next three years," Statoil vice-president said.

He recalled that in Azerbaijan, Statoil has been abiding by its principles through using the licence to develop the land to build positions in a particular area of their presence.

"In Kazakhstan, we consider the licence areas as 'potential', or shall we say, a platform for large scale works in the future," Dahl said.

According to him a lot of attention is being paid to such indicators as oil recovery through the use of technological content.

Statoil is the operator of 16 marine sites, Dahl said.

"We are investing in 504 offshore wells which provide 50 per cent of our oil," he added.

He added that Statoil now produces two million barrels of oil equivalent per day, of which 1.5 million are produced in Norway.

"At present, the company drills 50 deep water wells annually of which 20 are high grade. Statoil's exploration expenses amount to $3.5 billion dollars a year," the company's vice-president said.

Statoil was founded in 1972 and has evolved through the development of the Norwegian continental shelf. It operates in 35 countries and has 21,000 employees.

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