BAKU, Azerbaijan, February 9. The peak oil production in the Azeri Central East area of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oil-bearing block is expected in late 2025-early 2026, an informed source told Trend.
"The first oil from this section of the ACG block will be recovered in the second quarter of 2024. It takes 1.5-2 years for ACE to attain peak output of 100,000 barrels of oil per day," the source said.
Drilling of a producing well at ACE began on December 4, 2023; the well's design depth is 3188 meters.
Ole Maier, head of Turan Drilling & Engineering (TDE, which is in charge of production drilling at ACE), told Trend earlier today that several more production wells will be drilled at ACE in 2024, bringing the total number of wells at the ACE project to 48, with the capacity to produce up to 100,000 barrels of oil per day at peak.
Meanwhile, the $6 billion ACE project intends to maintain oil output at ACG, which has been declining for several years in a succession owing to geological reasons, such as reservoir depletion.
"The oil from ACE will not increase production in general in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli block, but it can stabilize it a bit starting from 2026," the source said.
The ACG field block produced 17.8 million tons of oil in 2023, down 12.7 percent from 2022.
Overall, ACG's reserves are estimated at 1 billion tons of oil, which it has been producing since 1997 and more than half of the block's resources have already been extracted.
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