HE President Ilham Aliyev of the Republic of Azerbaijan today visited the Zykh construction yard, where the Shah Deniz TPG 500 offshore platform and associated seabed foundations have been built and assembled.
The President toured the site and met representatives of the management and staff to review the status of construction activities which are almost complete.
The Zykh construction site is a SOCAR owned facility extensively upgraded by BP on behalf of the Shah Deniz partnership. Today it is a very high quality yard with excellent quayside, workshop and office facilities.
The yard is operated on behalf of the Shah Deniz partnership by Technip Maritime Offshore Limited (TMOL) - a subsidiary of Technip - the Paris based petrochemical engineering company, which is the partnership’s platform construction contractor. At peak construction activities at Zykh employed approximately 3500 people and more than 80% of these were Azerbaijani nationals.
“The performance of the workforce has been exceptionally good both in terms of safety and schedule. Prior to sail away, the yard completed more than 13 million man hours without a lost time accident. The project at Zykh has also been completed on schedule, and given that the TPG-500 is a very complex and difficult structure to build, this has been a very high quality achievement”, said Phil Home, BP’s Vice-President, Commercial, who welcomed the President to the site. “In addition, we also utilized the services of some 257 local companies for provision of equipment, material and other services to the yard.”
The President was informed that the Shah Deniz TPG-500 platform is a large jack-up comprising drilling, production and accommodation for 120 personnel. “It is a unique facility for the Caspian. The entire platform, including the legs, has been completely assembled here at the Zykh construction yard and will shortly be towed to the field for installation. Only two other platforms of this type have ever been built and both are presently operating in the North Sea in the UK,” Home said.
The three legs for the platform and its huge and complex foundation structures were built entirely in the Zykh 3 area of the yard and the whole platform has been assembled at the quayside of Zykh 4. The entire facility weighs approximately 32,000 tonnes. All systems on the platform have been tested and commissioned prior to sail away from Zykh.
The platform’s drilling facilities are capable of drilling wells with a length of over 7 km and with an outreach of more than 3 km, while its production facilities are capable of processing approximately 1 billion cubic feet (28.5 million cm) of gas and 60 thousand barrels ( 8000 tonnes) of condensate per day. Gas and condensate from the field will be transported via sub sea pipelines to the Sangachal terminal.
The TPG500 will be deployed in the Shah Deniz gas-condensate field in the Caspian Sea, approximately 100 km to the south of Baku. Delivery of first gas to Turkey, the primary sales market for the Shah Deniz project, is expected before the winter of 2006.
The parties to the Shah Deniz Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) are: BP (operator – 25,5%), Statoil (25,5%), the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR – 10%), LUKOil (10%), NICO (10%), Total (10%), and TPAO (9%).
Tamam Bayatly at BP’s Press Office in Baku, telephone: 994 (0) 12 599 4557