BP expects first oil from new Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli platform in Caspian Sea at start of 2024
BAKU. Jan 26 (Interfax) - BP is expecting first oil from the Azeri Central East (ACE) platform at the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli group of offshore fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea at the beginning of 2024, BP Vice President for the Caspian Region, Communications, and External Affairs Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli said.
"The platform's substructure was sent to sea [in December 2022] with the participation of the president of Azerbaijan. We'll send the upper blocks of the platform to sea this year. We're planning to begin drilling of the first well from the ACE platform in 2023, and the first oil is expected accordingly already at the beginning of 2024," Aslanbayli said in an interview with Azerbaijani television channel CBC.
Oil is currently produced from six platforms at Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli, and ACE will be the seventh, Aslanbayli said. "This will be an absolutely new platform, modern, with good performance, and correspondingly, this will help us to stabilize production at Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli," he said.
There has been a decline in oil production at Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli in spite of an increase in the amount of development wells, Aslanbayli said.
"The contract of the century [for the development of Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli] was signed in 1994, 28 years have passed since then, and the productivity of certain wells has fallen accordingly sufficiently into obsolescence, and production is falling from year to year. Production is falling, unfortunately, in spite of the fact that we have drilled a greater number of wells from year to year. We drilled more wells last year than in 2021. We're seriously discussing this issue, both with SOCAR [State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic] and with the government [of Azerbaijan], and we're undertaking certain additional measures. And one of these measures is the construction of the new ACE platform," Aslanbayli said.
According to the latest data from the Azerbaijani Energy Ministry, 20.4 million tonnes of oil was produced at Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli in 2022, down 9.3%, along with 13.4 billion cubic meters of associated gas, flat with 2021.
Total production at Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli was 567 million tonnes of oil and 203.4 bcm of associated gas as of January 1, 2023.
The ACE project is the next stage in the development of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli group of offshore fields. There are plans to drill 48 wells as part of the project. They will be drilled by Turan Drilling Company.
The goal of the ACE project is to produce a peak of up to 100,000 barrels per day of oil and 350,000 cubic feet of gas by drilling additional wells and installing additional facilities. The shareholders in the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli development project signed a final investment decision on the $6 billion ACE project in Baku in April 2019, which includes approximately $3.2 billion for construction works and the rest for development, including drilling new wells.
The project envisions the construction of a new production, drilling, and quarters platform in a water depth of 137 meters located midway between the Central Azeri and East Azeri platforms. The contract for the development of the Azeri and Chirag fields, as well as the deepwater portion of the Gunashli field, was signed in 1994.