Gas production is expected to start in 2025.

Mol Group, after SOCAR and BP, is the third largest owner of the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Gunashli (ACG) field in Azerbaijan, where gas layers have been discovered below and above the oil-producing layers. The partners have now agreed to extract and commercialize them. In addition, Mol and SOCAR have signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in hydrocarbon exploration in Azerbaijan.

The commercial agreements complement ACG’s existing production sharing contract, allowing the partners to explore, appraise, develop and produce gas reserves in the ACG field. ACG’s gas reserves are significant, and could reach 4 trillion cubic feet (about 112 billion cubic meters) in size.

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The first production well has already been drilled at the West Chirag platform, and gas production is expected to start in 2025. The role of the well is important, they wrote, because its extraction makes it possible to evaluate gas reserves, which helps in future development plans. This announcement is quoted by Zult Hernadi, President and CEO of MOL Group, who described it as an important milestone that after several years of developing and extracting oil fields, they are expanding their activities in Azerbaijan to extract natural gas reserves, which is due to excellent cooperation with SOCAR and other ACG partners.

“This day is also remarkable from the point of view of economic cooperation between Azerbaijan and Hungary, and thanks to the excellent intergovernmental relations between our countries, we were able to deepen our trade cooperation even more.

ACG is our crown jewel, as the bulk of our global hydrocarbon production comes from here. Mol Group’s participation in the project is also a milestone in the economic relations between the two countries, and ACG also plays a key role in the security of energy supplies in Central Europe.

The development of the field provides flexibility in purchasing crude oil for our refineries in Slovakia and Croatia, so the partnership is beneficial for the entire region.

Mol Group entered Azerbaijan in 2020, acquiring a 9.57 percent stake in the Azerbaijan-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) field, one of the world’s largest oil fields, and an 8.9 percent stake in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that carries crude oil to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

This share represents 15 percent of Mol Group’s total production in 2023 and 25 percent of its total hydrocarbon reserves. The BTC pipeline plays an important role for Mol Group refineries in Central and Eastern Europe, including Slovnaft in Bratislava and INA in supplying its refinery in Rijeka. The Azerbaijani interest gives Mol the flexibility to decide whether to sell its share of crude oil produced at ACG in Ceyhan to a third party, or to contribute to Europe’s energy security by using it within Mol Group in Central and Eastern Europe and increasing the flexibility of the company’s crude oil purchases.

They wrote that with eight decades of reservoir management, subsurface experience and production optimization, Mol actively contributes to the development of ACG even as a minority owner.

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