Why did head of BP Group company Robert Dudley visit Azerbaijan? The operations of BP-Azerbaijan company in Azerbaijan look normal: the oil production on the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) project was above the plan this year, the company expects about 630,000 barrels of oil a day against planned 620,000 barrels. Export of gas from the Shah Deniz project has increased and the company has also increased export to the Georgian market, which started last year. Despite insignificant decline of Azerbaijani oil export via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline on objective reasons, the export of Asian oil doubled against 2013.
However, President of such a company as BP is not going to spend so much time to inform President about all these good news. He has his own representative in Baku for this purpose.
According to Turan, one of the issues discussed in Baku was related to BP’s joining the TANAP project. The sides have almost no unsolved legal issues, it is just necessary to solve the bureaucratic issues.
Another issue was related to the company’s operations in Azerbaijan. Two weeks ago BP announced the forthcoming staff reduction in the company’s branches in the US, UK, Germany and Azerbaijan. BP office in Baku said that the employees not involved into the production and transportation operations will be laid off to maintain competitiveness of business.
However, sources from the oil industry told Turan that since January 1, 2015 BP-Azerbaijan plans to cut 15% of its staff, including the contractors. All these are non-office employees and Azerbaijani citizens.
For this reason BP President has arrived in Baku to make sure that reduction of this number of employees does not cause any problems for the government.
At present BP-Azerbaijan company numbers about 3,000 employees.
