French oil giant Total says it has found a major gas field in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan.
The field could produce billions of cubic metres of natural gas, said Total, which holds 40 per cent of the joint venture along with Azerbaijan’s national oil company SOCART (with 40 per cent) and GDF Suez (20 per cent).
The Absheron X-2 block is thought to have large pockets of gas spread over a 270 square kilometre field, and the company hopes to find several trillion cubic metres of gas and associated condensates.
“This discovery could be very significant in terms of resources,” said Total’s senior vice-president for exploration, Marc Blaizot.
“It is the result of Total’s bolder exploration strategy aimed at probing high-risk, high-reward prospects both in prolific and frontier basins, particularly in high-pressure, deeply buried reservoirs.”
Blaizot said the techniques developed by Total in its Caspian work would help it find more gas in similar basins off Britain, Brunei, Malaysia and Egypt, where new permits have been awarded to the company.
The Caspian well is currently at a depth of about 6550 metres, in 500m of water, 100km south-east of Baku, near Total’s existing Shah Deniz gas field.
Total has been working in Azerbaijan since 1996 and already pumps 13,000 barrels of oil per day there, while owning 10 per cent of the South Caucasus Pipeline Company and five per cent of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.
