Yesterday at the meeting with journalists and representatives of publicity in Baku BP Russia Vice President, BP group senior economist in Russia and CIS, Vladimir Drebentsov explained strange data of hydrocarbons production in Azerbaijan.
Turan news agency has recently found some differences in oil and gas production data after studying the last BP World Statistical Energy Review 2013. For instance, the Azerbaijan State Statistical Committee claims that in 2013 Azerbaijan extracted 43,083,300 tons of oil and condensate. But in the BP Review this data was 46.2 million tons. According to the same source, tank gas extraction totaled 17.9 billion cub.m., but according to BP -only 16.2 billion.
“In the print version we made a mistake in the oil data, because we have used old data from the database. We have already corrected the mistakes and our figure is close to that of the Azerbaijan State Statistical Committee,” said BP senior economist.
“As far as natural gas is concerned, this is fault of the State Statistical Committee and State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR). The post-Soviet countries calculate in cubic meters, which is different from the western norms. For this reason your cubic meters always appear to be 8-10% less according to the western standards,” explained BP representative.
Drebentsov’s explanation of the methods of gas calculation was a sensation. The Statistical Committee does not have its own meter for calculation of the natural gas volume. SOCAR provides this information to the Committee. SOCAR has been working with foreign companies for over 20 years. SOCAR has a huge Shah-Deniz gas project, the contract on which was signed in June 1996. But how come that our country failed to transit to the international standards of gas registration?
