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Norwegian company Statoil intends to sell its shares in the project of Shah Deniz and South Caucasus Pipeline to Azerbaijan. As it is reported by Azerbaijani portal Minval.az, vice-president of Nefte Compass BP, the responsible for the development of the project Shah Deniz Al Cook said that the transaction of purchasing 10% shares of Norwegian Statoil in Shah Deniz project and South Caucasian Pipeline by State oil company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) and the British company BP will be completed in the near future.

Cook voiced the hope that both transactions will be completed in the next few weeks.

As it is stated in the portal, according to the information provided by Statoil earlier, the size of the transaction from the purchase and sale of company assets in Azerbaijan equal to $ 1.45 billion.

As a result of the sale of Statoil assets in Azerbaijan, SOCAR and BP respectively acquired 6.7 % and 3.3 % in the project of the development Azerbaijani gas field "Shah Deniz" and the South Caucasus Pipeline

As it is stated in the portal the shareholders of Shah Deniz are (share-distribution after purchase-sale operation) BP (operator 28, 8%), SOCAR (16, 7%), Statoil (15, 5%), Total (10 %), Lukoil (10 %), NIKO (10%) and TPAO (9%).

Note that in March the British journal Financial Times wrote that the French oil and gas company Total intended to sell its share in the gas field of Azerbaijan because of the huge cost of the TAP project that aims at transporting Caspian gas to European markets. It was reported that the French company intended to sell its entire 10% share of Shah Deniz field. Before that Norwegian Statoil Company reduced its share from 5.5% to 15.5%.

The consortium of shareholders in the field, led by BP, in December announced a final decision to invest $28billion on the second phase of its development, one of the largest gas projects in the world, the Financial Times reports. They also announced plans to build pipelines to ship the gas 3,500 kilometers across Turkey, Greece and Albania into Italy. According to different sources Total’s decision was driven by the economics of the project. Taking into account the cost of building the pipelines, the total price tag for the project is likely to exceed $40billion.