At the end of this year and at the beginning of next year, the British BP company, the operator of the project, plans to start drilling the first data well in order to obtain additional information about the gas located in the deep layers of the "Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli" (ACG) oil and gas field block.

Gary Jones, regional president of BP for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, said this in response to the question of "APA-Economics".

He noted that there is gas in deep layers below the oil layers currently in operation of ACG, and the data and volumes related to it should be evaluated.

This is necessary to create an idea about how and according to what concept the "blue fuel" located in deep layers in the field will be exploited in the future.

"We are planning to drill a well for this, and this well will be drilled on the existing Chirag platform in the field," said Gary Jones.

According to him, the data obtained as a result of the drilling of the well will be evaluated and analyzed, as a result of which it will be determined whether additional wells need to be drilled: "If necessary, wells will be drilled on other platforms.

Let's see what the result is?

Let's analyze it and find out what our next step will be?"

Gary Jones added that drilling of the well will begin this year or early next year.

Preparations for this are currently underway.

It should be recalled that initially the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) on ACG was signed on September 20, 1994.

Since then, approximately 40 billion US dollars have been invested in the development of the ACG field.

The agreement between the parties was valid for 30 years (it was supposed to expire in 2024).

Nevertheless, on September 14, 2017, the government of Azerbaijan and SOCAR, together with international partner companies, signed an amended and revised agreement on joint development of ACG and production sharing.

The new agreement, covering the development of ACG until 2050, will make it possible to significantly increase the bloc's development potential by the middle of the century.

It should be noted that the share distribution in ACG is as follows: BP – 30.37% (operator), AzACG (SOCAR) – 25.00%, MOL – 9.57%, "Inpex" – 9.31%, "Equinor" (formerly Statoil) – 7.27%, ExxonMobil – 6.79%, TPAO – 5.73%, Itochu – 3.65% and ONGC Videsh Ltd.

(OVL) – 2.31%.