BP Azerbaijan Company held November 14 a briefing on the results of the first nine months of 2007.

President of BP Azerbaijan Bill Schrader gave detailed information about the work done in the company. During the first nine months of the year ACG spent $ 302.7 mln in operating expenditure and $ 2, 114 million in capital expenditure. For the full year, the company expects to spend $ 425 million in operating expenditure and $ 2, 672 million in capital expenditure.

BP Azerbaijan produced a total of about 180 million barrels (about 24.5 million tonnes and around 657, 000 barrels per day average) from the Chirag, Central Azeri, West Azeri and East Azeri platforms. Current total daily production is around 720,000 barrels per day.

Latest forecast is to produce an average of 674,000 barrels per day from the four platforms in total for the full year. Of this, 131,000 barrels per day is expected from Chirag, 239,500 barrels per day from Central Azeri, 177,500 barrels per day from West Azeri and 126,000 barrels per day from East Azeri.

Currently, Chirag has 21 wells in operation, Central Azeri 16 wells, West Azeri and East Azeri 10 and 7 wells respectively.

In 2007 it was planned to deliver 1.4 bln cubic meters of ACG associated gas to SOCAR. However, as agreed by AIOC and SOCAR early this year it was delivered up to 8.0 mln standard cubic meters of gas per day to SOCAR during the first half of 2007, and this will take total associated gas delivery to Azerbaijan this year to about 2.2 billion cubic meters.

During the first nine months of 2007 oil from ACG continued to flow via one 24” and two 30” subsea pipelines to the Sangachal terminal. The terminal’s highest daily export rate to date was on July 7, 2007, when Sangachal processed and exported a record 999,700 barrels of oil.

During the third quarter oil continued to be transported from the Sangachal terminal to the global markets, principally via BTC. The total volume of oil and condensate exported in October via BTC was 20.3 million barrels (over 2.7 million tones).

The Western Route Export Pipeline (WREP) to Supsa remains shut down to allow the completion of an extended repair program, which includes re-routing of a one km section in Georgia. The pipelines will restart when the company complete all the necessary repairs and satisfy integrity of the system.

The company currently employs about 3500 people at ACG construction sites and over 72% of these are Azerbaijani nationals.

During the first nine months of 2007, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) spent $109 million in capital expenditures and the total capital expenditures in 2007 are expected to be $ 174 million. BTC’s daily record throughput rate of 903,000 barrels per day was achieved in July 2007. The pipeline’s average daily throughput for October was about 653,5 thousand barrels of oil per day, which is target on one million barrels per day (approximately 50 million tones per year) in late 2008.

Shar Deniz project spent $108 million of the planned $219 million operating expenditure for the full year, and $ 266 million of the planned $ 372 million annual capital expenditure on Shah Deniz activities. Shah Deniz production is currently in excess of 500 mmscfd (about 14.2 million cmd) of gas and over 30,000 barrels of condensate per day.

The Company spent $ 56 million of the planned $73 million for capital expenditure on South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) activities in 2007.

On November 11, the company spudded the well in the offshore Inam contract area, which covers 2225 esq. approximately 140 km south of Baku. The so-called “ Inam Bank” in the central part of the area has a minimum water depth of four meters. The target depth of the INX-2 well is approximately 5,300 meters.