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Another promising member of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli family will be born

02 December 2009 16:30 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Nijat Mustafayev â€“ APA-Economics. BP Azerbaijan has on Wednesday held a presentation on the Chirag Oil Project (COP), another promising member of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) family.

Faig Asgarov, environmental manager at BP Azerbaijan, spoke about the history of Azerbaijan oil and gas industry, and the countryâ€™s achieving a milestone of 35 million tonnes of oil per annum.

â€œOil and gas production is expected to further increase in the future after Chirag Oil Project and Shah Deniz Phase 2 go on stream,â€ he added.

BP Azerbaijanâ€™s offshore projects officer Ilgar Mammadov delivered a presentation on the Chirag Oil Project.

The COP will consist of a new 48-slot drilling and processing platform to be installed between Chirag-1 and DWG platforms, designated West Chirag production, drilling and quarters (WC-PDQ) platform. The platform will be located in approximately 170m of water depth.

It is planned that the COP jacket and topsides will be built using the existing fabrication yards near Baku starting in 2010

The major activities will include the fabrication of a new drilling template, a new steel jacket and piles, a new topsides deck and new drilling facilities.

The new platform design will be based on the previous successful platforms at ACG. It will be constructed based on the model of East Azeri platform. New intra-field pipelines will be installed offshore to tie the WC-PDQ platform into the existing ACG infrastructure.

According to him, the fabrication of steel jacket and piles will commence this month and on-site installation will start in mid-2010. Topsides will be deployed in 2013.

In his words, the company is due to sanction the COP in the first quarter of 2010.

The COP will produce 183 million barrels of oil per day and 229 million standard cubic meters of gas when it starts up in 2013.

Fabrication of the new facilities will be performed in Azerbaijan to a greater extent than has ever been done in the past.

This will specifically include the additional in country fabrication of the heavy structural box nodes for the deck, the super duplex stainless steel pipe spools and the drilling facilities.

The ACG oilfield includes two main horizons: Fasila and Balakhany.
The production so far has been almost entirely from the Fasila reservoir. When the ACG PSA was signed in 1994, it was agreed that the consortium will start development of the Fasila horizon first and move to Balakhany later.