Page 11 - FSUOGM Week 03 2020

FSUOGM PROJECTS & COMPANIES FSUOGM
BP kicks off exploration drive in Azerbaijan
AZERBAIJAN
The major wants to find another Shah Deniz.
BP has spudded its first well at the Shafag-Asi- man block off the coast of Azerbaijan, kicking off an exploration campaign it hopes will lead to the discovery of plays similar in size to the giant Shah Deniz field.
Work on the SAX01 well began on January 13, BP confirmed in a statement. The well is set to take nine months to complete, reaching a total depth of 7,000 metres. According Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company SOCAR, BP’s project partner, the Heydar Aliyev semi-submersible is being used to sink the well. Launched in Baku in 2017, Heydar Aliyev is owned by SOCAR’s sub- sidiary Caspian Drilling Co. (CDC).
“We are excited and proud to be embarking on this first exploration well on Shafag-Asiman – a structure which has significant potential for a large-scale gas discovery,” BP’s regional president Gary Jones commented. “A great deal of prepara- tion has been made to [ensure] a safe and robust drilling programme.”
BP has said before it is hoping to make a firm discovery at Shafag-Asiman that is comparable to Shah Deniz, Azerbaijan’s largest gas field with an estimated 1.2tn cubic metres of resources. BP has not said exactly how much gas is expects to find at the block, although SOCAR estimates that the area could hold 500bn cubic metres of gas and 65mn tonnes of condensate.
BP signed a production-sharing agreement (PSA) for the 1,100-square km Shafag-Asiman area in 2010. The block lies 125km south-east
of Baku in waters 650-800 metres deep, and is believed to contain reservoirs at depths of between 5,000 and 8,000 metres.
The UK major operates the project with a 50% stake, while SOCAR controls the remaining 50% interest. The pair shot a 3D seismic survey in 2012 and finished interpreting the data three years later. Since then they have repeatedly put off drilling plans, with low oil prices suspected to be a key factor behind the delays.
BP is Azerbaijan’s biggest oil and gas inves- tor, and one of its oldest, opening its first office in Baku in June 1992 – less than a year after the country declared its independence from the USSR.
Today BP’s chief projects in the country are the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) oilfields and the Shah Deniz gas field, where it is partnered with SOCAR and other international majors. These two projects flowed 542,600 barrels per day (bpd) of oil and 8.3 bcm of gas respectively in the first half of 2019.
BP’s focus now is finding other Caspian Sea resources that can be tied to existing infra- structure at ACG and Shah Deniz. A year ago it announced plans to drill a series of exploration wells in the country, not only at Shafag-Asiman but also at the offshore Shallow Water Absheron Peninsula (SWAP) and D-230 areas and the onshore Gobustan block.
The Shafag-Asiman probe is the first of these wells to be spudded. ™
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