OCT. 29 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani border guards shot dead one armed Iranian after a group crossed the border illegally from Iran, media reported quoting Azerbaijan’s border agency. Tension between Azerbaijan and Iran has been rising for the past year, partly because of a series of shootouts along the porous border.
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(News report from Issue No. 111, published on Nov. 2 2012)
OCT. 24 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – The head of Azerbaijan’s state energy company Socar, Rovnag Abdullayev, said there were no plans to drop BP as the operator of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian Sea. Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev had criticised BP earlier this month for disappointing production figures from the field.
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(News report from Issue No. 110, published on Oct. 26 2012)
OCT. 18 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – BP transferred 10 senior engineers to Azerbaijan to help boost production at the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oil field it operates in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, Bloomberg news agency reported. Earlier this month, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev publicly blamed BP for declining production at ACG which came on-stream in the mid-2000s.
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(News report from Issue No. 109, published on Oct. 19 2012)
OCT. 13/14 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – A series of shallow earthquakes shook the region around the Azerbaijan-Georgia border. No casualties were reported although the magnitude 5.3 and 4.8 earthquakes rocked Tbilisi and other towns.
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(News report from Issue No. 109, published on Oct. 19 2012)
OCT. 11 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek president Islam Karimov continued his diplomatic push across Central Asia and the South Caucasus by visiting Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev. Since the start of September, Mr Karimov, normally one of the more stand-offish regional leaders, has already visited Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)
OCT. 10 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – At a government meeting broadcast on TV, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev blamed BP for declining oil production from fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea.
Such a public and unequivocal rebuke is virtually unprecedented in Azerbaijan’s recent energy history and it will sting.
BP is the dominant foreign oil company operating in Azerbaijan. Other fields are due to come on stream in the next decade but at the moment the key operations are the Shah Deniz gas field and the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) fields.
Mr Aliyev said that “grave mistakes” by BP had triggered a 12% reduction in ACG’s oil production this year and cost Azerbaijan $8b in lost oil revenues over the past three years.
BP, which owns about 36% of the field, has not given a reason for the decrease in oil production but, in response, said it was committed to both ACG and working in Azerbaijan.
The start of production at ACG had been greeted with great excitement but anticipated production of 1m barrels of oil a day quickly evaporated.
Now, the challenge is to maintain output at a far more modest 700,000 barrels of oil a day and to appease the all-powerful Mr Aliyev.
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(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)
OCT. 9 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – BP announced that gas supplies from the Shah Deniz field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea to Turkey had resumed after a blast on the South Caucasus pipeline disabled it on Oct. 4. CORRECTION: In last week’s bulletin, we mistakenly named the damaged gas pipeline as the Baku-Tbilsi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. BTC is, of course, an oil pipeline. Apologies.
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(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)
OCT. 11 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – In one of Azerbaijan’s biggest terrorism trials, a court in Baku jailed 22 people for 10 – 15 years for plotting a series of attacks on behalf of Iran, media reported. Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran have been increasingly strained over the past 12 months.
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(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)
OCT. 4 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – An explosion disabled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline which pumps gas from the Shah Deniz fields in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea to Turkey, media reported. This is the second explosion in the Turkish part of the BTC pipeline, a route critical for European gas supplies, this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)
OCT. 3 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s parliament has thrown out Gular Ahmadova, the MP filmed trying to organise a bribe from a businessman in exchange for a seat in the legislature, media reported. The video, filmed in 2005, has shaken the Azerbaijani political establishment. Ms Ahmadova had been a relatively prominent figure in the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan party.
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(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)