BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 14. A ceremony was held to celebrate the finishing touches and the launch of the “Neptun” self-elevating drilling rig, crafted for digging the inaugural appraisal well in the southern flank of the Umid gas field, Trend reports.
The event was attended by officials from SOCAR, Nobel Upstream, the Umid Babek Operating Company (UBOC), the Azerbaijan branch of Caspian Oilfield Services (COS), and other partner companies involved in the project.
The “Neptun” rig will drill an offshore appraisal well in the southern flank of the Umid field, scheduled for October 2025. This will be the first time in SOCAR’s history that a self-elevating floating rig is used for such a well, which will also be the deepest well drilled in the Umid field to date, reaching a planned depth of 7,067 meters. Drilling and subsequent formation testing are expected to take approximately ten months.
The initial stage of the Ümid field's development has yielded an aggregate of 12.3 billion cubic meters of gas alongside 1.8 million tons of condensate, as recorded on September 1, 2025.
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