A drilling program for this year of the Azneft Producing Unit (PU) on extraction of oil and gas under the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) will be approved in the last decade of January, SOCAR told Trend.
Under the draft program about 132,000 meters is supposed to be drilled. This volume of work is equivalent to the drilling volume for 2005. However, despite the ongoing production drilling no growth in oil extracting is expected. The SOCAR efforts are currently aimed at maintaining the existing production volumes.
From the total drilling volume about 1500 meters will fall at the exploration drilling. This indicator is also equal to the last year figure. Drilling of exploration wells in large volumes is not performed by SOCAR during many years.
As the SOCAR spokesmen note, it is explained by the fact, that all fields within Azerbaijan have been already explored. The main part of the off-shore prospecting is performed by foreign companies, possessing sufficient funds and technologies for these works.