Baku hosts 5th Caspian Oil and Gas Trade-Transport Conference

Baku has opened the 5th Caspian Oil and Gas Trade-Transport Conference, demonstrating that Azerbaijan, as an independent state, is successfully realizing its policy in all spheres, head of the parliament committee for economic policy Ziyad Samedzade said, Trend reports.

Samedzade said that Azerbaijan demonstrates that allegations that an oil country has no stable economic growth is wrong. Azerbaijan has had stable economic growth for 10 years. Its GDP has tripled. Gross product per capita is $6,000. Foreign debt is only 6% of GDP.

The Vice-President of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic (SOCAR), Khoshbakht Yusifzade, said that Azerbaijan extracts 50-55 million tons of oil annually, which is rational for the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field.

Azerbaijan produced 50.7 million tons of oil in 2010, most of which comes from the field.

Extraction may increase to 60-70 million tons annually. But it is not necessary for stable growth.

The Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field has 925 million tons of oil and 280 billion cubic meters of gas reserves.

SOCAR proposed that BP, the technical operator of the Shah Deniz gas condensate field, develop lower horizons of the field within the second stage of the project.

The contract on development of Shah Deniz was signed on June 4, 1996. Its participants are BP (operator) with 25.5%, Statoil – 25.5%, NICO – 10%, Total – 10%, LUKOIL – 10%, TPAO – 9%, SOCAR – 10%.

Gas is currently transported to Georgia and Turkey using the South Caucasus gas pipeline.
The cap extraction level is 9 billion cubic meters. The second stage of development may increase extraction to 25 billion cubic meters annually.