Hungary’s foreign minister has said that the country’s leading oil and gas player MOL Group is set to move forward with an oil and gas development project in Azerbaijan.
Speaking in Budapest on Friday last week, Peter Szijjarto said that “MOL is on the verge of signing another agreement to become the operator of another large Azerbaijani field”, according to Baku-based news outlet Report.az.
“An agreement has been reached that, in addition to crude oil production, natural gas production will also start with MOL’s participation in one of the world’s most significant hydrocarbon fields from next year,” Szijjarto reportedly said on Friday following a meeting with a group of Azerbaijani government officials, although he did not specify the details of the field.
MOL announced in June that it had signed key terms with Azerbaijani state run oil and gas player Socar for an exploration, development, and production sharing agreement for a new onshore area covering the Shamakhi-Gobustan region of Azerbaijan.
The company said that it will be the operator of the block and 65% shareholder in the project while Socar would hold a 35% stake in the project.
The Shamakhi-Gobustan region is mostly known for a higher number of mud volcanoes and oil seeps on the ground whose presence is generally considered in Azerbaijan to indicate good potential for hydrocarbon exploration.
However, prior exploration efforts have been slow because of the area’s complex geological structure.
MOL Group entered Azerbaijan in 2020 with the acquisition of a 9.57% stake in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) offshore project — home to one of the world’s largest offshore oil fields — and an effective 8.9% stake in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that transports oil from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
Its equity interest in ACG represented 14% of MOL’s total oil production and 25% of total reserves in its portfolio as of 2024, MOL said.
