Azernews.Az

By Fatma Babayeva

Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company SOCAR presented the final proposals to its partners on a new contract for the development of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) -the block of offshore oil fields in Azerbaijan.

The remark was made in the briefing by the president of the company Rovnag Abdullayev.

Abdullayev noted that the negotiations in this direction have already been completed.

SOCAR has presented its proposals for the ACG oil field block to the partners, he said adding that “Now, the ball is now on their court”.

According to the president of the company, now, partners have to develop and present their final proposals, as well as, evaluate the proposals presented by SOCAR.

The contract on the development of ACG (so called contract of the century) was signed in 1994. The type of the signed contract was Production Sharing Agreement (PSA).

Azeri Light crude is being produced in ACG field.

Oil reserves of the oil fields’ block amount to about one billion tons. Shareholders of the contract are BP (operator - 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), Itochu (4,3 per cent), ONGC (2,72 percent).

According to the BP’s recently revealed oil output report for Azerbaijan in Q1 2016, Azerbaijan produced 8 million tons of oil in the first quarter of 2016.

The country produced 31.3 million tons of Azeri Light oil in 2015 compared to 31.5 million tons in 2014.

In the meantime, operating expenses within ACG project totaled $137 million in January-March 2016, while the capex stood at $396 million.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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