BP-Amoco plans third test well at Shah-Deniz

BP-Amoco announced that it did plan to sink a third test well at the Shah-Deniz field.
Drilling at the SDX-3 site will begin in the fourth quarter of this year, BP-Amoco said.
The company hopes that the new exploratory shaft will serve to confirm earlier estimates of the field's reserves. BP-Amoco and its partners recently completed a six-week series of testing at the second test well but has yet to make an official announcement on the results.

Natik Aliyev, the president of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), said in late January that the results from the second well were very encouraging; Russian media sources quoted him as saying that Shah-Deniz appeared to contain 700 bn cm of natural gas or more. SOCAR's top geologist Khoshbakht Yusifzade had said last September 10 that the second well appeared to show that Shah-Deniz contained as much as 1 tcm of gas. Yusifzade cautioned, however, that the BP-Amoco-led group could not issue authoritative reserve data until it drilled another well.
The Shah-Deniz group had obtain special permission to wait until 2000 to drill the third exploratory well. Under its production-sharing contract, signed in 1996, the group had been obligated to sink three test wells within the three-year period ending in October of 1999. However, drilling work was delayed last year due to the shortage of rigs in the Caspian.

Equity in the Shah-Deniz consortium is split 25.5% each to BP-Amoco and Statoil; 10% each to Russia's LUKoil, France's Elf Aquitaine, Iran's OIEC and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR); and 9% to Turkish Petroleum. BP-Amoco is serving as operator of the project. The group's production-sharing contract was approved by the Milli Majlis, the Azerbaijani parliament, on October 4, 1996, and BP began work in late October of the same year.