Azernews.Az

Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR will start drilling of the first production well on the Umid gas field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea by late October, SOCAR First Vice-President Khoshbakht Yusifzade said on Tuesday.

He said the preparatory work to start drilling is almost complete.

Earlier, SOCAR started supplying gas onshore from a well on the Umid field.

According to Yusifzade, at present daily flow-rate of the well is 850,000 cubic meters of gas and 150 tons of condensate.

Umid is located 75 kilometers from the capital Baku, 40 miles from the Caspian coast. Geophysical works at Umid started in 1953 and were resumed in 1972. A total of 9 wells were drilled from 1977 to 1992, but no commercially viable reserves were discovered at the time.

In 2009, SOCAR financed exploration work at Umid. This was the first time since the Contract of the Century signed with energy majors in 1994 that Azerbaijan conducted exploration entirely on its own. The discovery of over 200 billion cubic meters of gas and 40 million tons of condensate was announced by SOCAR in November 2010 after successful drilling at 6,500 meters on exploration platform Umid-1.