Azerbaijan's 1H Commercial Gas Output Falls

Azerbaijan's commercial gas production fell 9% to 9.363bn m³ in the first half of this year, the state's statistics committee announced. But despite the decline in commercial gas output, the country's total gas production increased by 1.2% to 14.923bn m^³ in 6 months, which means Azerbaijan increased gas re-injection.

The country produced 29.742bn m³ of gas in 2015, including 19bn m³ of commercial gas. The total gas extraction amount for 2016 is projected to stand at 29.345bn m³, while the commercial gas production is expected to be about 10% lower than last year.

Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli platform (Credit: BP)

The other factor that contributed to declining commercial gas output, apart from reinjection, was an accident on one of the offshore production platforms, which extracted 1.3mn m³/d.

BP began pumping more associated gas into the oil wells, part of which was earlier transferred to Azerbaijan (3.2bn m^³ in 2015). This has been done to stabilize oil production on the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) bloc.

Azerbaijan desk