BP to Drill First Deep Gas Production Well at Huge Azeri Field in H2

BP expects to drill in the second half of 2024 the first production deep gas well at the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) oilfield, the largest oilfield in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian basin.

“Last year, we drilled an appraisal well on ACG to explore the deep gas reservoirs under the producing oil field,” Katerina Papalexandri, vice president gas and low-carbon energy growth, Caspian at BP, said at an event in Baku, as carried by news agency Trend.

“The data we have obtained from the well looks promising. This gives us confidence to plan for the drilling of the first production well in the second half of the year. We are going to drill it from the West Chirag platform,” Papalexandri added.

If the drilling of the first production well is successful, the supermajor, which is operator of the ACG field, will achieve first deep gas at the huge oilfield in early 2025, the executive noted.

At the end of last year, BP also started drilling the first production well from a new platform developing the next $6-billion stage of the ACG field.

BP announced that the first production well was spudded from the new Azeri Central East (ACE) platform, following the safe completion of all offshore hook-up, installation, and commissioning of the ACE topsides unit which sailed away from the Bayil fabrication yard in August 2023. The new platform and facilities are designed to process up to 100,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) and the project is expected to produce up to 300 million barrels over its lifetime, BP said.

The new project was sanctioned in April 2019 and was the first major investment decision by the ACG partnership following the extension of the ACG Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) to 2049, agreed in 2017. Around $42 billion has been invested in the development of the ACG area since the original PSA was signed in 1994, according to the UK supermajor. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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