Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Natig Aliyev died on Friday in Turkey, and his body will be flown to Azerbaijan's capital Baku on Saturday, Upstream Online reports, quoting the Azeri Energy Ministry as saying.
Oil and gas industry veteran Aliyev, 69, suffered a cardiac arrest last weekend in Baku, according to the ministry. Earlier this week, Azeri media reported that Aliyev was hospitalized in Baku due to heart problems, and was in a serious but stable condition.
Aliyev was later flown to an Istanbul hospital, where he died on Friday.
Aliyev had served as Azerbaijan's energy minister since 2005.
Before that, he was chairman of state energy company SOCAR, and took active part in the negotiations for Azerbaijan's first offshore Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) with western majors.
Azerbaijan and a consortium of foreign oil companies signed back in 1994 a 30-year PSA for the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Guneshli (ACG) field. Foreign partners in the venture-alongside SOCAR's 11.6 percent interest-include BP, Chevron, INPEX, Statoil, ExxonMobil, TPAO, ITOCHU, and ONGC. BP, which holds a 35.8 percent stake in the venture, is operator of the field.
In the first quarter of this year, total production at Chirag was on average 55,000 barrels per day (bpd), according to BP.
Azerbaijan, which is part of the OPEC/non-OPEC production cut deal, continues to stick to its commitment to cut 35,000 bpd of its output, the energy ministry said earlier this week. Azerbaijan has submitted its output and exports figures for May to OPEC's Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, with data showing production at 785,300 bpd in May, including 55,000 bpd of condensate. Azerbaijan exported 596,500 bpd of crude oil, 55,000 bpd of condensate, and 12,200 bpd of oil products last month, according to its energy ministry.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More