Azerbaijan's state oil company announced last week that natural gas reserves in a major offshore field in the Caspian Sea are believed to be nearly twice as large as previously estimated.
Recent drilling at the Shah Deniz field showed that total gas reserves could be as much as 1.2 trillion cubic meters of natural gas and 240 million tons of gas condensate, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan said in a statement.
That is nearly double the recent reserve estimate by BP PLC, the company leading the development of the field - about 640 billion cubic meters.
The statement from the company, known as SOCAR, quoted First Vice President Khoshbakht Yusifzade as saying that the new estimates were based on the results of drilling at a $240 million, 7,300-meter exploration well on the field's southwest flank.
The BP-led consortium developing Shah Deniz also includes Norway's Statoil ASA, France's Total SA and Russia's OAO Lukoil. Azerbaijan has some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet Union.
Also last Thursday, SOCAR President Rovnaq Abdullayev announced the company planned to resume pumping oil via the Baku-Supsa pipeline next spring, after engineers replace a large section of piping and make some $22.5 million in repairs.
The 500-mile pipeline, running from the Azerbaijani capital to the Georgian Black Sea port, has been shut down since last November after problems were found in some sections.
The pipeline has a 140,000-barrel-a-day capacity. Shipments arriving in Supsa are loaded onto oil tankers that must then traverse Turkey's Bosporus, which are dangerously crowded. Several western- and Russian-led projects are seeking to build pipelines to circumvent the straits.
Abdullayev also announced that SOCAR planned to break ground on a $4 billion oil refinery near Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan beginning next year, in cooperation with Turkish company Turgas.
(The Associated Press)