Kazakh Energy Minister Bolat Akchulakov told Reuters that the Kashagan oilfield will resume production at a level of 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) by the end of October, QazMonitor reports with reference to OilPrice.com.
Akchulakov spoke on the sidelines of the Russian Energy Week in Moscow, assuring that the equipment in the oilfield is under maintenance and will resume operations by the end of this month.
The Kashagan oilfield is one of the world’s biggest oil fields in terms of capacity to pump crude oil. The consortium includes Eni, ExxonMobil, CNPC, Shell, TotalEnergies, Inpex and Kazakh state energy firm KazMunayGaz.
In early August, the oilfield was shut down after a gas leak was detected on the site. A few days later, the field operator said that it would partially restart production, and upon completion of repairs and integrity verification, the output would be boosted up to 500,000 bpd.
In the middle of September, Minister Bulat Akchulakov said that Kashagan would resume normal operations “in October at best”, while CPC would resume full operations before mid-October.
Kazakhstan’s oil production and exports have been lower in recent weeks due to the partial outage at Kashagan and urgent repairs needed at two of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s (CPC) terminals on the Black Sea.
The minister added that all three mooring points at the Black Sea terminal of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) will likely resume operations before the end of this month.
The 1,500-km CPC pipeline from the giant Kazakh oilfields in the Caspian Sea to Novorossiysk, on the Russian Black Sea coast, transports over two-thirds of all Kazakh export oil along with crude from Russian fields, including those in the Caspian region.
Higher production and exports out of Kazakhstan could be a relief for global oil supply just as the OPEC+ group is set to reduce supply to the market starting in November. Most of the actual cuts – estimated at around 1 million bpd compared to the headline 2-million-bpd cut to production – will come from OPEC’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia, followed by UAE and Kuwait.