What is the reason of oil production decline onshore Azerbaijan?

Production on the fields of State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) has been going down. In 2009 Azneft, production company of SOCAR, extracted 6,891,000 tons of oil, a year later this index totaled 6,871,000. In 2011 it extracted only 6,730,000 tons. This means that during a year the production on the fields dropped by 141,000 tons.

Commenting on the decline, Khoshbakht Yusifzada, SOCAR's Senior Vice President for Geology, told Turan that "the reason of decline is that majority of the fields are at the last stage of development." He said intensive development of the fields preceded this process.

According to his forecast, annual decline of production by about 150,000 tons (over 1.1 million barrels) is inevitable on SOCAR's fields.

Asked by TURAN's correspondent "why does production decline on the onshore fields operated by foreign companies," SOCAR Senior Vice President said the reason is that many wells were watered ahead of time and the operation companies did not want to drill new exploration wells to save their money. 

"However,  we discuss the budgets of operation companies for year 2013 and many budgets envisage drilling of new wells to stabilize production," Yusifzada explained.

During 2011 the biggest production decline was on the fields of Global Energy offshore  company, which is registered on the Virgin Islands, but is connected with the Russian billionaire Mikhail Guzeriyev. On some fields the production decline reached 50%.-0----