Oil & gas boost on the horizon: SOCAR taps SLB for Caspian Sea duo’s revamp

October 7, 2025, by Melisa Cavcic

U.S.-headquartered technology player SLB has signed on the dotted line to pool resources with the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) for the redevelopment of two oil and gas fields in the Caspian Sea to augment production from these mature assets off the coast of Azerbaijan.

The companies’ cooperation agreement is envisioned to facilitate the acceleration of the redevelopment of the Bahar and Gum Deniz fields in the Caspian Sea by identifying promising production zones, the development of comprehensive reservoir modeling, and the design of well and drilling rig programs to support the early production scheme (EPS) at these fields.

SOCAR claims that the project will play an important role in its long-term strategy aimed at increasing oil production and extending the operational life of mature offshore assets. The initiative is set to generate practical development scenarios that will up the production ante while ensuring operational efficiency and sustainability.

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Project & Tenders

Babek Huseynov, SOCAR’s Vice President for Development and Production Operations Segment, has highlighted that the redevelopment project represents an important step in optimizing production at mature fields through the application of advanced methods, expecting it to lay the technical foundation for the next stages of the redevelopment of the Bahar and Gum Deniz fields.

Greenfields Petroleum Corporation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Bahar Energy Limited (BEL), owns an 80% interest in the exploration, rehabilitation, development and production sharing agreement (ERDPSA) with SOCAR and its affiliate SOCAR Oil Affiliate (SOA) in the offshore block known as Bahar Gum Deniz, which consist of a contract rehabilitation area (CRA) including the Bahar gas field, the Gum Deniz oil field, and an exploration area (CEA).

With 89 offshore platforms, multiple pipelines, and approximately 16.8 kilometers of steel causeways with well pads from an offshore island into the shallow waters of the Caspian Sea, the Bahar project comprises producing oil and gas fields offshore Azerbaijan in the shallow waters, up to 10 meters deep, located south of the Absheron Peninsula and a few kilometers east of Baku.

These fields are situated in the northwestern portion of the South Caspian Basin, which contains large proven oil and gas resources with over 100 discovered fields. The CRA entails 34 producing wells, 24 in the Gum Deniz oil field producing crude oil with associated gas, and ten in the Bahar gas field producing natural gas with condensate.

Greenfields Petroleum, which underlines that the CRA also has another 224 wells that are shut in, emphasizes that other producing assets adjacent to the Bahar project encompass large oil and gas discoveries with reserves amounting to multi-billion barrels of oil and multi-trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas, such as BP’s prolific Shah Deniz field southeast of the Bahar area, which is estimated to contain nearly 25 tcf of potential gas.

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The Gum Deniz oil field, in production mode since 1955, was developed using around 109 drilling and production platforms, most of which were connected to a steel causeway network approximately 16.8 kilometers long.

While parts of the causeway and many of the platforms are said to no longer be in operation or accessible, the causeway allows personnel and small packages of production, drilling, and workover equipment to be moved via small motorized vehicles to the production platforms.

With oil, water, and gas delivered via pipelines along the causeway to a main collector line, which carries all produced fluids to onshore treatment facilities, most producing wells are on gas-lift using compressed gas from onshore gas compression facilities, while other wells employ electrical subsurface pumps.