The offshore Tengiz oil field should return to usual production rates within a week, Kazakhstan’s energy minister said today, as quoted by Reuters.
The Tengiz field stopped pumping oil earlier this month after a fire destroyed three transformers. The incident has cost Kazakhstan 7.2 million barrels in lost oil production. Earlier this week, the power distribution system of the field was restarted, the consortium operating the field said in a statement. The Chevron-led group also said it had begun restarting oil production at the field.
Tengiz has the capacity to produce 900,000 barrels daily, but before the transformer fire took it out, it pumped around 360,000 barrels daily.
“We have restored some of the work of these transformers, and now the field is being launched in stages. The first gas has already appeared, so I think the entire Tengiz will be launched in stages within a week. Maybe even earlier,” Minister Yerlan Akkenzhenov told the media.
The transformer accident follows a Ukrainian drone attack on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is the main conduit for Kazakh crude to world markets. The CPC operates the pipeline from the Caspian coast in northwest Kazakhstan to the Novorossiysk port, which handles most of Kazakhstan’s crude exports from giant oilfields in Kazakhstan operated by international oil firms, including U.S. supermajor Chevron. CPC transports crude oil from three major fields in Kazakhstan, Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak.
On the flip side, the CPC disruption and the Tengiz outage will help Kazakhstan fit within its oil production quota under OPEC+ requirements, which feature compensatory production cuts after months of overproduction on the part of several members, including Kazakhstan.
“Due to the decrease in production and the incident at CPC and Tengiz, I think that we are going just within the stated volumes,” the energy minister said.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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