BP & SOCAR to Sign Second Azeri Gas Deal

SOCAR president Rovnag Abdullayev has said that SOCAR and BP will sign a second production sharing agreement for Azeri gas fields before the end of this year.

The agreement will related to the Azeri-Chirag-Geneshli (ACG) gas and oil fields and follows on from a previous deal signed between the ACG partners signed in 1994.

The SOCAR president said the agreement would include all of the initial partners still remaining from the 1994 deal, which includes SOCAR, BP, Chevron, INPEX, Statoil, ExxonMobil, TPAO, Itochu and Hess.

"It will be our second contract on ACG and it will touch on deep gas reservoirs," Reuters reports Mr. Abdullayev as saying at a conference in Baku on Tuesday. "Members of the agreement will be the same companies as in the first one."

The executive did not say definitively that BP would remain as operator of the project but said that it was a possibility.

The ACG fields have proven massive reserves of both oil and gas with reserves of gas estimated to be around 280 billion cubic metres.