State-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. will sign on Wednesday a memorandum of cooperation with Azerbaijan's state-owned Socar to explore upstream potential in the Caspian oil and gas producing country, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Monday.
Under the MOC, Jogmec and Socar will jointly cooperate to run seismic geological surveys at "promising blocks" in Azerbaijan, where Japan hopes to get preferential rights to explore, a METI official said.
The MOC will also cover jointly developing technologies such as Enhanced Oil Recovery, or EOR, and Improved Oil Recovery, or IOR, in addition to providing Socar engineers and Azerbaijan government agencies with technological training by Jogmec, the official said.
The MOC will be signed on the sidelines of the International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition in Baku, which METI parliamentary vice minister Daisaku Hiraki will attend, the official added.
In September 2017, Japan's Inpex and other partners extended their production sharing agreement for the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Gunashli, or ACG, oil fields about 100 km east of Baku in the Caspian Sea by 25 years until December 31, 2049.
Following the extension, Inpex, which currently has a 9.31% stake in the ACG oil fields, pumped an average of 588,000 b/d of crude oil in 2017, according to an Inpex spokesman.
Crude oil produced at the ACG oil fields is transported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, or BTC pipeline, to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, from where it is shipped to customers, according to Inpex.
