BP to Send Topsides of New Platform at ACG Block to Sea in June
The dispatch to the sea of the topsides of the Central East Azeri platform at the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) block of fields is scheduled for June, Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli, BP Vice President for Communications and External Relations in the Caspian and Middle East region, said.
“The upper blocks have already been loaded onto a barge and they are planned to be sent to the sea to the point in June. The first oil production under the CVA project is scheduled for early 2024,” Aslanbayli told reporters on Wednesday.
He recalled that the new platform is designed to produce 100,000 bpd of oil.
The platform’s topsides include oil and gas processing units, an integrated drilling rig, a gas compressor and accommodation units. The design weight of the modules is 19.6 thousand tons.
As Interfax-Azerbaijan previously reported, the support block of the CVA platform was sent to sea on the STB-1 barge in March 2023. On April 4, 2023, with the participation of the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, a ceremony was held to symbolically send the upper structures of the Central East Azeri platform into the sea.
According to BP-Azerbaijan, after sending the upper modules to the sea, it will take several months to complete the offshore part of the construction work and operational tests and start drilling the first well to produce the first oil from the CVA platform in early 2024.
The CVA project is the next stage in the development of the ACG block of fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea. Within the framework of the project, it is planned to drill 48 wells, which will be carried out by TURAN Drilling Company.
The aim of the CVA project is to achieve daily peak production of up to 100,000 barrels of oil and 350,000 cubic feet of gas by drilling additional wells and installing additional offshore facilities.
On April 19, 2019, the shareholders of the ACG block development project in Baku signed a final investment decision on the $6 billion CVA project, of which about $3.2 billion is construction costs, the rest is development costs, including drilling new wells.
The project provides for the construction at a depth of 137 meters of a new production and drilling platform with a residential block between the platforms “Central Azeri” and “East Azeri”.
The contract for the development of the Azeri, Chirag and deepwater Gunashli fields was signed in 1994.
Production of oil and associated gas from the ACG block began in November 1997. At present, the share of British BP (project operator) is 30.37%, SOCAR (25%), Hungarian MOL (9.57%), American ExxonMobil (6.79%), Indian ONGC Videsh (2.31%), Japanese Inpex Corp. (9.31%) and ITOCHU Oil (3.65%), Norwegian Equinor (7.27%), Turkish TPAO (5.73%).
In 2022, about 152 million barrels (20 million tons) were produced at the ACG block of fields. Oil production from this contract area in 2022 in barrels decreased by 9%. Production is carried out from 6 platforms.
