Azernews.Az

By Fatma Babayeva

Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR plans to build nine infrastructural bases for drilling of 81 oil and gas wells in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea in 2016-2017 as part of the company's development strategy that will give impetus to hydrocarbon production growth in the country.

The statement was made by SOCAR’s President Rovnag Abdullayev to the mass media on June 6.

"SOCAR implements drilling programs, within the framework of which the platform No. 7 at the Guneshli field and the platform No. 6 at the Bulla Deniz field were built, and the drilling operations have already started there," Abdullayev noted, adding that several more platforms will be built in the future.

"The new gas platform at the Guneshli field will become the first one in the history of independent Azerbaijan, the design and construction of which was fully implemented by SOCAR," said the company’s president.

The platform is designed for drilling of 20 wells (six gas wells and 14 oil wells). It is planned to daily extract 100 tons of oil and 15,000 cubic meters of associated gas from each oil well, 150,000 cubic meters of gas and 15 tons of condensate from gas wells, according to estimates. The project cost slightly exceeded 180 million manats ($120 million), most part of which, i.e. 111 million manats ($74 million) accounts for construction work.

SOCAR is involved in exploring oil and gas fields, producing, processing, and transporting oil, gas, and gas condensate, marketing petroleum and petrochemical products in domestic and international markets, as well as, supplying natural gas to industry and the public in Azerbaijan.

SOCAR is a shareholder in Absheron (40 percent), Azeri Chirag Deep Water Guneshli (ACG Ltd. - 11 percent), Bahar Gumdeniz (20 percent), Shafag Asiman (ACG Ltd.- 50 percent) and Shah Deniz (Shah Deniz Ltd. – 10 percent) offshore projects.

Roughly 3,469 million tons of oil was produced in Azerbaijan in April 2016, 624,500 tons of this production accounted for SOCAR, according to the statistics provided by the company’s official website. In March, oil output of SOCAR amounted to 646,200 tons.

Regarding the gas production, Azerbaijan extracted 2,475 billion cubic meters of natural gas in April 2016.

SOCAR produced 6,871 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2015 and 7,223 billion cubic meters in 2014.

In accordance with the statistics, 5.45 million tons of oil products were produced in Azerbaijan during 2015 compared to 5.31 million tons of oil products manufactured during 2014.

SOCAR owns petrol stations in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Romania and Switzerland.

Currently, SOCAR implements modernization projects of its refineries in Azerbaijan as well.

Overall, Azerbaijan holds 0.4 percent of the world’s total proved oil reserves and produced 1 percent of the global petroleum output in 2014, according to the BP’s statistical review of world energy 2014.

In the meantime, the country owns 0.6 percent of the world’s total proven gas reserves and generated 0.5 percent of the global total gas production in 2014.

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

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