The volume of the US investments in the Azerbaijani economy has reached $14 billion, of which $12.8 billion relates to the oil and gas industry, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov.

The volume of investments in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector increased by 18.8 percent year-on-year in the period between January and April, amounting to 1.1bn dollars, the State Statistics Committee told local media on May 22.

Azerbaijan which is famous as the oil country in the entire world celebrates Oil Workers Day- professional holiday of workers of oil and gas industry on September 20, commemorating the signing of a landmark production sharing agreement between Azerbaijan and consortium of foreign oil companies, also known as Contract of the Century due to its tremendous importance.

Georgia and Turkey have so far received 5.5 and 41 billion cubic meters of gas respectively through the Southern Caucasus Pipeline as part of Shahdeniz-1 project, said Khoshbakht Yusifzade, the first vice-president of SOCAR, while addressing the first Eurasian conference of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE).

Energy rich Azerbaijan is expected to extract first volumes of gas from the Absheron gas condensate field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea in 2019, said Khoshbakht Yusifzade, the first vice-president of SOCAR.

The current account deficit of Azerbaijan's oil and gas sector stood at $522.5 million in January-March 2016 compared to $2.146 billion as of January-March 2015, according to the balance of payments made public by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA).