83% of works on Chirag Oil Project completed

By present 83% of works on Chirag Oil Project (COP) - construction of the production platform Western Chirag - has been already completed, Ilgar Mammadov, BP representative, COP chief of ground operations, told journalists yesterday.

He said for the first time in the history of Azerbaijan such a platform has been fully built in Baku, including the upper constructions. "Construction of the drilling equipment was among the most difficult elements here. However, all difficult works were done locally," said BP representative.

Mammadov said that in quarter 1, 2013 the foot block of the Western Chirag platform will be delivered to the permanent location spot. The foot block was loaded on the barge in October 2012, but it has not been delivered, because the drilling operations are currently in progress on the drilling site using semi-submersible drilling rig Dede Gorgud.

The platform will be installed on the site, where the sea depth reaches about 170 meters. 48 wells can be drilled from the platform. After putting of the platform into operation in quarter 4, 2013, it is planned to extract over 300 million barrels of oil during the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) contract period, which expires at the end of 2024.

Chirag Oil Project was authorized on March 6, 2010. The project implementation started in June 2010. Total cost of the project is $6 billion, of which $2 billion fell to the wells drilling, construction of underwater infrastructure and etc.

ACG partners are BP (operator with 35.78%), SOCAR (11.65%), Chevron (11.27%), INPEX (10.96%), Statoil (8.56%), ExxonMobil (8%), TPAO (6.75%), ITOCHU (4.3%) and Hess (2.72%).-0---