BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 12. Hungarian MOL Group, which has recently made the first-ever shipment of oil from Azerbaijan’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli block of fields to its own Slovnaft refinery in Slovakia, may use Azerbaijani oil regularly, Slovnaft told Trend.
"This shipment was based on a spot transfer, but the option is there to potentially make it regular. We now have the flexibility to decide whether to sell our share of the crude oil produced from the ACG field or transport it to our refineries, which improves the security of supply in Slovakia as well as our core region," said Slovnaft.
MOL Group is transporting crude oil produced at its co-owned oilfield, the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli in Azerbaijan all the way to Slovnaft Refinery in Bratislava. This is a major step for the company’s efforts to increase its crude sourcing flexibility. Also, the arrival of the Seavelvet tanker from the Port of Ceyhan in Turkey to Omisalj in Croatia and then transporting the 90,000 tons of crude oil to Bratislava through the Adria pipeline is a success story for MOL Group: it constitutes well-to-wheel integration of its value chain as it will process and sell petroleum products refined at one of its own refineries using crude oil produced at a field it co-owns. The shipment is transported from the Sangachal oil terminal near Baku to Ceyhan via the BTC pipeline, also co-owned by MOL Group.
Test production of petroleum products using the Azeri Light produced at the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oil field – of which MOL Group owns 9.57% - will begin in April. This comes after successful testing at Slovnaft Refinery of several types of oils from Middle East and Caspian region.
MOL Group holds 9.57 percent share in Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli block.
Total ACG production for the full year of 2022 was on average about 415,400 barrels per day (b/d) (about 152 million barrels or 20 million tonnes in total) from the Chirag (25,200 b/d), Central Azeri (104,100 b/d), West Azeri (106,400 b/d), East Azeri (64,000 b/d), Deepwater Gunashli (76,300 b/d) and West Chirag (39,400 b/d) platforms.
The total volume of oil production in Azerbaijan in 2022 amounted to 32.6 million tons. During the reporting period, the country exported 26.3 million tons of oil.
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