Azerbaijan, Bau / corr TrendCapita l S.Aliyev / The Azerb aijan International Operating Company (AIOC) is pleased to announce that on July 26 2007 the topsides of Phase 3 Drilling, Utilities and Quarters Platform (DUQ) were safely installed offshore onto the jacket in the Deepwater Gunashli part of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) field.
This follows the successful s ail away of the 15,656 tonnes topsides from the Heydar Aliyev Baku Deepwater Jacket Factory (BDJF) fabrication yard on July 25.
The parties to the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) Production Sharing Agreement are: BP (operator - 34.1%), Chevron (10.3%), SOCAR (10%), INPEX (10.,0%), Statoil (8,6%), ExxonMobil (8%), TPAO (6.8%), Devon (5.6%), Itochu (3.9%), Hess (2.7%).
The DUQ jacket, which was also built at BDJF , s ailed away on April 9 and was launched offshore and docked onto pin piles at the template location in Deepwater Gunashli two days later. The height of this jacket is about 190 metres.
The DUQ platform is located at 175 metres water depth on the Deepwater Gunashli field. First oil from Deepwater Gunashli is planned to be achieved during 2008. This will ultimately r aise the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli offshore facilities' total oil production capacity to over one million barrels per day.
The last topsides module to be installed for Phase 3 is for the Production, Compression, Water Injection and Utilities (PCWU) platform. The construction of these topsides is now approximately 98 per cent complete and we plan to install them offshore during September 2007 following full completion of the DUQ topsides installation.
Bruce Luberski, BP's Vice-President, Major Projects, said: "This is a major step towards achieving this year's extremely busy work plan. We have already completed the pipelay barge refurbishment, installation of the Phase 3 north and south subsea manifolds on DWG and the DWG Productionn, Compression, Water Injection and Utilities platform jacket. We are now looking forward to equally safe and successful installation of the last topsides in September and are also preparing for execution of a large modification to increase gas and water handling at Central Azeri. In addition, we plan to complete the produced water project pipelay.