This move follows the impressive milestone of extracting one billion barrels of oil from the West Azeri platform, a key component of the seven-platform Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) complex in the Caspian.
This seismic endeavor, which began on January 20, 2024, is being heralded as BP’s most extensive global seismic project to date, in terms of scale, budget, and duration. Roshni Moosai, BP’s Vice President Subsurface for the Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye region, emphasized the significance of the ACG field to BP, Azerbaijan, and their partners. The project aims to achieve a detailed understanding of the field’s reservoir structure and fluid movement.
Spanning an area of 740 square kilometers for sources and 507 square kilometers for receivers, the seismic program is focused on the ACG field’s Balakhany and Fasila reservoirs. The project is projected to cost approximately $370 million and is scheduled to run for five years, from 2024 to 2028.
As the lead in the ACG field development, BP started planning this extensive program in the previous year. The plan includes conducting five monitoring operations over five years, utilizing state-of-the-art ocean bottom nodes. The operations will be carried out using the dual source vessel Murovdag and the node vessel Guba.
Moosai expressed optimism that the advanced 4D technology employed in this project would provide deeper insights into the reservoir, aiding in reducing unforeseen drilling issues and enhancing field recovery in the coming decades.
The seismic survey will be executed by Caspian Geo LLC. BP collaborates with several partners in the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field, including SOCAR, MOL, Inpex, ExxonMobil, TPAO, ITOCHU, ONGCVidesh, and Equinor, which is in the process of transferring its stake to SOCAR.
The ACG production sharing agreement (PSA), initially signed in September 1994, was revised and restated in September 2017, extending its validity until the end of 2049. This extension aims to maximize the economic returns from the ACG field for Azerbaijan and its shareholders over the next three decades.
To date, the ACG field has produced over 4.3 billion barrels (581 million tons) of oil, primarily transported to global markets via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Western Route Export pipelines. The total investment in the ACG field has surpassed $43 billion as of the end of the third quarter of 2023.
The ACG field, currently featuring nine offshore platforms, including seven production and two process, gas compression, water injection, and utilities platforms, exports oil and gas to the Sangachal terminal near Baku, one of the world’s largest oil and gas terminals. In the first three quarters of 2023, the total production from ACG averaged 368,000 barrels per day.
The development of the ACG field has been carried out in several phases, starting with Chirag in 1997 under the Early Oil Project (EOP), followed by multiple phases leading to the latest Azeri Central East (ACE) project, scheduled to commence in early 2024.
