Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 17
By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:
The temporary swap operations on Russian gas supplies to Azerbaijan between SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan) and Russian Gazprom will increase oil production at the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) block of fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev told reporters Sept. 17.
Abdullayev said that gas consumption greatly increased in Azerbaijan over the past two years.
"The gasification process has been actively carried out in Azerbaijan recently," he said. "At present, its level exceeds 90 percent. This increases demand for gas. Therefore, we redirected those volumes of gas, which we supplied to Russia, to the domestic market."
"The gas extracted at the Shah Deniz, is contracted for supplies to Georgia and Turkey, and therefore we don't have additional volumes for Gazprom," Abdullayev added. "In this regard, a gas swap with Gazprom will allow us to further ensure gas supply to southern regions of Russia, to test out our gas storage facilities, as well as, in case of a consistently high level of injection into them, to reduce the volume of extraction of associated gas at the ACG, and to pump it to the maximum extent to reservoirs to increase oil output at the block."
Earlier, a senior representative of SOCAR told Trend that almost a quarter of all the gas produced at the ACG is pumped back into the reservoir to maintain pressure.
BP, in 2014, delivered 2.76 billion cubic meters of associated gas to SOCAR versus 2.19 billion cubic meters delivered in 2013.
The contract for development of ACG field was signed in 1994. The proven oil reserve of the block nears 1 billion metric tons.
The shareholders of the project are: BP (operator in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli) - 35.78 percent, Chevron - 11.27 percent, Inpex - 10.96 percent, AzACG - 11.65 percent, Statoil - 8.56 percent, Exxon - 8 percent, TPAO - 6.75 percent, Itocu - 4.3 percent and ONGC - 2.72 percent.
Edited by CN
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