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Some 365 million metric tons of oil has been produced from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli block of oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan from 1997, and 198 million metric tons of this is Azerbaijan’s profit oil, said Khoshbakht Yusifzade, the first vice president of Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR.

Yusifzade made the remarks at a joint meeting of the Presidium of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) on April 29.

“In the same period [from 1997] the volume of the associated gas produced at the ACG was 107 billion cubic meters. The daily production stands at 90,000 metric tons of oil and 35 million cubic meters of gas,” he said.

Yusifzade said some 88 wells are operating at the field.

“The volumes of the profit oil are growing each year. For example, in the early years, the funds were going to capital investments. Last year, 34 million metric tons of oil was produced at ACG, and of this 22.5 million were profitable for Azerbaijan, which is about 70 percent,” said Yusifzade.

He said that out of 373 million metric tons of oil exported by Azerbaijan, some 271 million metric tons accounted for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

He added that since the start of the operation, 61 billion cubic meters of gas and 16 million metric tons of condensate was produced at Shah Deniz field.

Yusifzade reminded that the natural gas reserve at Shah Deniz field is estimated at 1.2 trillion cubic meters of gas and 240 million metric tons of condensate. “There is no such an offshore field with such huge natural gas reserve in any part of the world.”

He added that six wells operate at the field and 29 million cubic meters of gas is produced from these wells per day.

The produced gas is not only used to meet the domestic demand, but also exported to Georgia and Turkey, said Yusifzade.

Currently, the total volume of Azerbaijan’s gas export is 33 billion cubic meters and 4.5 billion of this volume is exported to Georgia, according to SOCAR’s vice-president.

He noted that currently, the total proven oil reserve in Azerbaijan nears 2 billion metric tons, gas – 2.55 trillion cubic meters, while the forecasted reserve nears 6 billion cubic meters.

“Such reserves will allow to fill the TAP and TANAP pipelines without the participation of other countries,” Yusifzade added.

The contract for the development of the ACG was signed in 1994.

The shares in the contract for the ACG development are distributed as follows: BP (operator in Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli) - 35.78 percent, Chevron - 11.27 percent, Inpex - 10.96 percent, AzACG - 11.65 percent, Statoil - 8.56 percent, Exxon - 8 percent, TPAO - 6.75 percent, Itochu - 4.3 percent and ONGC - 2.72 percent.

The contract for development of the Shah Deniz offshore field was signed on June 4, 1996. The field’s reserve is estimated at 1.2 trillion cubic meters of gas.

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