Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept.26
Trend:
Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) plans to suspend the West Chirag platform for five days due to maintenance work, Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli, BP Vice President of communications, external affairs and strategy in the region told local media, Trend reports.
He stated that the use of new technologies allows to reduce the time for carrying out maintenance and inspection works on production platforms and, accordingly, to reduce the shutdown time of the platforms themselves.
Aslanbayli added that thanks to these technologies, the platform’s shutdown period will be just five days, instead of fortnight as usual.
It should be noted that the West Chirag platform is part of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) complex which consists of six production platforms: Chirag 1, Central Azeri, West Azeri, East Azeri, Deepwater Gunashli, and West Chirag.
The West Chirag platform has been installed between the existing Chirag and Deepwater Gunashli platforms. First oil from the platform was achieved on 28 January 2014.
AIOC is a consortium formed to implement the terms of the “Agreement on the Joint Development and Production Sharing for the Azeri and Chirag Fields and the Deep Water Portion of the Gunashli Field in the Azerbaijan Sector of the Caspian Sea” signed among SOCAR and international companies such as BP (project operator, 30.37 percent of the project share) SOCAR (25 percent), Chevron (9.57 percent), ExxonMobil (6.79 percent), Indian ONGC (2.31 percent), Japanese Inpex Corp. (9.31 percent) and ITOCHU Oil (3.65 percent), Norwegian Statoil (7.27 percent), Turkish TPAO (5.73 percent)