Baku, April 19, AZERTAC

“We have changed the energy map of Europe and Eurasia”, said President Ilham Aliyev during his inauguration ceremony on April 18.

“Of course, the oil and gas sector accounts for the major part of our economy. Naturally, a special attention has been paid to this sphere over the last 15 years and it will continue this way. Over these years, we have managed to make really historic achievements. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the foundation of which was laid by the National Leader Heydar Aliyev, was commissioned in 2006, and thereby, we started to receive big revenues,” said the president.

The head of state went on to add that a year later, the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline turned Azerbaijan into a gas exporter.

“At present, we are engaged in the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor. This project is implemented on our initiative. The project was launched in 2012. We can say that the previous years yielded no results, because we were holding negotiations for several years to supply large volumes of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, but there were no results. When we saw this, we realized that we must rely on ourselves, and we made historic decisions. We are successfully implementing a very complex project. This is a very capital-intensive project both from the economic and technical point of view,” said President Aliyev.

The head of state noted that the investments in the Southern Gas Corridor project amount to $40 billion and the major part of these funds are provided by foreign partners and banks.

"This coincided with the global economic crisis and it was not so easy to attract those investments to the country," said President Aliyev. “Of course, we managed to achieve this by diplomatic, political and economic means. Three projects included in the Southern Gas Corridor – Shah Deniz 2, South Caucasus Pipeline and TANAP – will be commissioned this year. We have already changed the energy map of Europe and Eurasia. In the years to come, Azerbaijan will act as a country supplying very important energy resources to world markets. Of course, we will receive additional revenues, which will be used for our country’s development."

"Over these years, we have taken important steps related to the future development of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli fields. A new contract was signed. The contract was extended until 2050 and we managed to increase our share. At the same time, we got a bonus worth $3.6 billion and its first part has already gone to the treasury. In the next years, we will work with partners on other promising structures in the oil and gas sector.”

President Aliyev noted that Azerbaijan has almost reached its goal in the oil and gas sector and the Southern Gas Corridor will be fully commissioned in one or two years.