bp starts new project aimed at reducing emissions at Shah Deniz

The Shah Deniz partnership is commencing the define stage of a new project which will allow the Shah Deniz Alpha (SDA) platform to receive its power supply from the Shah Deniz Bravo (SDB) platform through a subsea cable, Report informs, citing bp-Azerbaijan.

The project is designed to significantly reduce SDA's operational emissions and increase the platform's operational efficiency, providing a robust, long-term, high-availability power supply.

SDA's electric power is currently supplied by five main power generators designed to be run by dual–gas and diesel, fuel engines. The existing generators will be decommissioned once the new project becomes operational in 2024.

Cathal Kelly, bp's vice president, Projects, for the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkiye region, Russia, Egypt and Oman, said:

"We expect the project to provide a Significant Emission Rate (SERs) of around 20 kte CO2 per year, reducing SDA's overall carbon footprint and adding to our and Shah Deniz partners' decarbonization efforts. This will be a substantial contribution to achieving our aim to reduce emissions from our oil and gas operations and is in line with what we aim to achieve globally by working to significantly reduce our operational emissions, aiming for net zero by 2050 or sooner. In addition, the project will help us achieve multiple other objectives by raising SDA's operational efficiency and minimizing commercial gas delivery interruption risks."

As part of the new project, the Shah Deniz partnership recently awarded a front-end engineering design (FEED), turnaround engineering, and procurement support services contract to the SOCAR-KBR joint venture.

The scope of work of the $5.7 million contract includes the FEED services for decommissioning the existing main power generators on the SDA platform and the creation of a power supply system from the SDB platform via a subsea cable. This project will be delivered from SOCAR-KBR's Baku office to maximize local content.

Shah Deniz – located in the Caspian Sea offshore Azerbaijan and discovered in 1999 – is the largest gas discovery ever made by bp. The giant field covers approximately 860 square kilometers and had approximately 1 trillion cubic meters of gas and 2 billion barrels of condensate initially in place. Since the start of operations till the end of the first quarter of 2022, the Shah Deniz field has produced about 164 billion cubic meters of gas and 37 million tonnes of condensate.

The field currently produces around 70 million cubic meters of gas and 105 thousand barrels of condensate per day.

The first phase of the Shah Deniz field began production in 2006, delivering more than 10 billion cubic meters per annum (bcma) of gas to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkiye. The second phase of Shah Deniz development began production in 2018 and, at a plateau, will add 16 bcma of gas production capacity to bring total production capacity from the field to 26 bcma of gas.

Shah Deniz 2 gas started to flow to Turkiye in June 2018 and has now reached the plateau of 6 billion cubic meters per annum. With the full completion of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) pipeline system in 2020, gas from Shah Deniz has been flowing to Europe.

Shah Deniz participating interests are: bp (operator – 29.99%), LUKOIL (19.99%), TPAO (19.00%), SOCAR (14.35%), NICO (10.00%) and SGC (6.67%).