Baku News

20 April 2007 - Upstream OnLine - South Korea's Energy Ministry held a working-level meeting with Azeri counterparts to speed up its deal to take a stake in the BP-operated Inam field, in Azerbaijan's Caspian Sea play. South Korea reached a preliminary deal with Azerbaijan for a 20% stake in the field, but a final decision has yet to be made. "The deal is almost at its end, and will likely be sealed by the first half of the year," Lee Seung-woo, director of oil and gas development division at the Energy Ministry, told Reuters after the meeting in Seoul. Inam, which estimated to hold about 2 billion barrels of probable oil reserves, is half-owned by Azerbaijan's national oil player Socar. BP and Shell have an equal split of the remainder. Previously, the ministry said it was eyeing stakes owned by Socar, but Lee declined to confirm the seller. Socar, BP and Shell signed a $4 billion production sharing deal on Inam in 1998, estimating then that the deposit held about 730 million barrels of oil.