Azeri oil block produces over 124m barrels in half-year
Oil giant BP and its partners produced 16.8 million tons (124.5 million barrels) of oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block of fields in the Caspian Sea in the first half of 2012, a BP report said Wednesday.
Average daily oil production from the BP-operated fields was 684,000 barrels in January-June, according to the report.
In 2011 BP extracted about 35.4 million tons, or about 262 million barrels of oil, from the ACG block.
In the first half-year, a total of 56 oil wells were producing, while 30 wells were used for injection at the ACG fields, the report said.
In 2011, there were a total of 63 production oil wells, while 32 wells were used for injection at the ACG fields.
During the first half of 2012, ACG spent $346.4 million in operating expenditure and $1.209 billion in capital expenditure. For the full year, about $708 million and $2.516 billion respectively are expected to be spent on ACG activities, the report says.
ACG participating interests are: BP (35.78 percent), Socar (11.65 percent), Chevron (11.27 percent), Inpex (10.96 percent), Statoil (8.56 percent), ExxonMobil (8 percent), TPAO (6.75 percent), Itochu (4.3 percent) and Hess (2.72 percent).
Associated gas
Azerbaijan's state energy firm Socar received 11.5 million cubic meters of associated gas per day (more than 2 billion cubic meters) from the ACG fields in the first half-year, BP said.
In total, BP is expected to transfer to Azerbaijan about 3 billion cubic meters of associated gas in 2012, however, this figure is exceeded each year.
The company transferred over 3.3 billion cubic meters of gas in 2011, which was 1 billion cubic meters above projections. In 2010 the figure was 3.4 billion cubic meters -- significantly over the projected 1.9 billion cubic meters.
The associated gas produced from the ACG fields is transferred to Socar free of charge.