SEPT. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — BP said it will suspend operations at the Chirag oil platform, in Azerbaijan’s sector of the Caspian Sea because of planned maintainence work. BP didn’t specify when Chirag would resume operations. Chirag, together with Azeri and Guneshli, is one of the most important oil fields in Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — If oil prices remain steady at roughly $50/barrel, Kazakhstan’s state oil and gas company, Kazmunaigas will post a profit of 75b tenge ($279m) in 2015, Sauat Mynbayev, the company chairman, told the Interfax news agency. In 2014, the company posted a profit of nearly 200b tenge ($743m at the current rate). Mr Mynbayev said the government’s decision to let the tenge float free against the dollar has helped contain losses.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s oil production has fallen by 2.8% in the first eight months of the year, a source at the statistics committee told Reuters.
The data is more economic bad news for Azerbaijan. Oil underpins the economy and a drop in production means a drop in revenue. A regional economic decline has already hit Azerbaijan hard, forcing it to cut government budgets and to devalue its manat currency this year.
The source told Reuters that a decline in output from BP’s Azeri, Chirag and Guneshli (ACG) oilfields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea had pulled its overall output down.
Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev stepped in and ordered BP to stop the output decline at ACG. BP has had sporadic success at stopping the drop in output at ACG, although it has now restarted its slow, steady decline.
Daily oil output at the ACG fell to an average 641,000 barrels/day (bpd) in the first half of 2015 from 656,000 bpd in the same period in 2014 and 661,000 bpd in the first quarter of this year, BP said. ACG makes up most of Azerbaijan’s oil production.
Output at ACG slowed during Q2 when BP closed the West Azeri platform for maintenance. It has now closed the Chirag platform for maintenance. A BP spokesperson said operations at the Chirag oil platform would be suspended from sometime in the autumn. It was not clear when Chirag would re-start operations.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan will begin construction on the multi-billion- dollar gas pipeline running from its fields in the east of the country to India in December, Reuters quoted an unnamed government official as saying. This is the strongest indication yet that work is about to being on the so-called TAPI pipeline.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — London-listed Nostrum Oil & Gas said in a statement that a proposed $37.5m takeover offer of Tethys Petroleum, a Central Asia-focused oil company, has not yet been accepted. Nostrum said some of Tethys’ Board expectations were unrealistic as “the underlying financial position of Tethys has continued to deteriorate.”
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Tengizchevroil consortium developing oil fields in west Kazakhstan awarded a “significant” contract to Scotland-based engineering company Xodus. Xodus tests the strength of rigs and other upstream oil structures using sound waves.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan Methanol Company (AzMeCo) signed a deal with Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom for the supply of 2b cubic metres of gas to its methanol production plant. Under the agreement, Gazprom will supply 100% of AzMeCo’s needs at the plant in Garadagh, a district just outside Baku.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
ALMATY, SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), has finished upgrade work to two pumping stations that will boost the capacity of its oil pipeline running from west Kazakhstan to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
Plans to increase the capacity of the Tengiz field near Atyrau have been delayed because of low oil prices, but the gradual expansion of the CPC’s capacity is still important.
Specifically, the latest upgrade work was focused on the pipeline’s two pumping stations in Kazakhstan. The upgrade will boost the flow of oil through the pipeline to 38m tonnes of oil from 35m.
This is a stepping stone towards hitting higher capacity. Nikolai Savin, a deputy vice-president at Russian pipeline company Transneft, explained the consortium’s ambitions.
“The expansion will allow us to increase the volume of transported oil to 67-70m tonnes a year,” local media quoted him as saying. “In the future, the Kazakh fields at Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan will ship around 55m tonnes through CPC.”
CPC, which was established in 2001, is an international pipeline jointly operated by the Russian and Kazakh governments together with national and multinational oil companies led by US’ Chevron. Chevron is also the lead Western partner developing the Tengiz field in the Tengizchevroil consortium (TCO).
The Tengiz field is Kazakhstan’s main oil producer, pumping roughly 27m tonnes of oil each year. This is a third of Kazakhstan’s total oil production. Almost all of the oil produced by Tengiz is exported via CPC.
For years, TCO has been planning to expand production. The project was suspended, though, earlier this year because of the sustained low oil prices, frustrating both investors and the Kazakh government.
According to Sauat Mynbayev, Chairman of Kazmunaigas, Kazakhstan’s state-owned company which holds shares in both CPC and TCO, a final investment decision for Tengiz will be made in Jan. 2016 (Sept. 17). In any case, he said costs had been cut.
“When it was planned, the TCO expansion was quoted at $38b,” Mr Mynbayev told the Interfax news agency. “In the current circumstances, we decided to re-negotiate with all contractors to bring the cost down to around $34b.”
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Almaty and the oil-rich region of Mangistau in the west of the country are the only regions in Kazakhstan receiving a significant inflow of people looking for work, data published on the ranking.kz website reported. The data also showed that most of the people moving to these areas settled in villages rather than cities.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
SEPT. 17 2015, YEREVAN (The Conway Bulletin) — The owner of the Armenian Electric networks company, Russia’s Inter RAO Holding, said it wanted to sell the company to Cyprus-registered Liormand Holdings Limited, triggering more bad feeling towards the company which many people already blame for trying to raise electricity prices.
It’s unclear why RAO would want to sell the Armenian electricity provider to a Cyprus shell company, but Russia does have a background in using this type of scheme to muddy companies’ ownership structures.
Whatever the reasons, the depth of bad feeling towards RAO and confusion about what the deal means for ordinary people was clear on the streets of Yerevan after the announcement.
Anna Khachatryan, a student, said: “We don’t know anything about Liormand Holdings Limited. Is it a good manager?”
Earlier this year thousands of people protested in Yerevan against a proposed 17% price rise, eventually forcing the government to back down and drop most of the plans.
The 1in.am news website wrote in a commentary, that the deal to sell the company was problematic.
‘The sale of the electricity networks does not give the answers of existing important economic and political questions, but, in fact, raises many new questions,” it wrote.
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(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)
