Oil Stones

Oil Stones is a unique offshore field, which was an outstanding event in the development of the SSSP oil business. Oil Stones at that time was the largest offshore oil field in the world, both in terms of reservoir power and oil production. Oil Stones is a unique city on stilts. For a short time in the open sea, at a distance of up to 50 kilometers from the coast, large marine fisheries equipped with first-class domestic equipment at that time were created. Oil Stones are considered the capital of the Caspian shelf.

Large-scale geological studies of the N.K. region were carried out in 1945-1948. The construction of the village began in 1958. Two power plants with a capacity of 250 kW were built, a boiler room, an oil gathering station, treatment plants, 16 two-story houses, a hospital, a bathhouse, etc. By 1960, the building of the Baku Petroleum College was built. In 1966-1975 there was already a bakery, a lemonade workshop, two 5-story dormitories and one 9-story residential building. A park with trees was laid out. In 1976-1986, the construction of oil gathering stations, three 5-story dormitories, a dining room, a hospital, two gas and oil compressor stations, a biological drinking water installation, two underwater oil pipelines with a diameter of 350 mm to the Dubenda terminal was completed. On the overpasses car traffic is carried out. Between Oil Rocks and the port of Baku, regular ship and helicopter communications are maintained.

The name “Oil Stones” has historical significance - long before the discovery of this field, scientists noticed black rocks covered with a film of oil in the Caspian Sea. This area of ​​the sea was called Black Stones. The Oil Stones area began to be studied already in 1859 , which was reflected in a number of works by various scientists: the outstanding Caucasus researcher academician G.V. Abikh and famous geological scientists S. A. Kovalevsky, F. A. Rustambekov, A. K. Aliyev, E. N. Alikhanova , B. K. Babazade, V. S. Melik-Pashaev, F. I. Samedov , Yu. A. Safarov, S. A. Orujev , A. B. Suleymanov, H. B. Yusifzadeh, M.F. Mir-Babaev and many others.

One of the first initiators of oil production from the bottom of the sea was a mining engineer V.K. Zglenitsky, who on October 3, 1896, turned to the Baku Mining Department with a request to allow him to drill wells on an artificial continent in Bibi-Heybat Bay. To his petition, he attached an original project for that time, according to which it was planned to build a special waterproof platform at a height of 12 feet (up to 4 m) above sea level with the launch of extracted oil into barges.

In the case of the fountain, a special barge was provided with a carrying capacity of up to 200 thousand tons of oil, which would ensure the safe export of oil ashore. The Caucasian Mountain Department rejected his request, nevertheless, recognizing that the bottom of the Caspian Sea near Absheron is oil-bearing, and it would be desirable to check both the oil-bearing capacity of the seabed and experimentally identify the technical feasibility of oil production and the economic conditions of such a method of operation.

The first practical work to study the geological structures of the NK water area was carried out in 1946 by the oil expedition of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, as a result of which huge oil reserves were discovered.

A powerful impetus for the exploration of oil and gas fields in various parts of the Caspian Sea was the production of offshore oil from Ilyich Bay (now Bail estuaries) from the world's first well No. 71, built in 1924 on wooden piles. Later, in the USSR in 1932-1933, two more foundations were built, when it became clear that the oil-bearing circuit extends beyond the Bibi-Heybat Bay, which was covered in 1932 . The first base, built at a distance of 270 m from the eastern fence of the backfill of the bay at a depth of 6 m, had an area of ​​948 m² and a length of 55 m.

The first landing of oil workers who landed on the Oil Rocks on November 14, 1948, was composed of the landing leader Nikolai Baibakov , the author of the idea of ​​offshore oil deposits, the head of the Aznefterazvedka association Sabit Orujov, geologist Agakurban Aliyev and drilling specialist Yusif Safarov . One of the experienced post-war Caspian captains Azhdar Sadikhov was the captain of the sea tug “Victory”, on which the landing party sailed. In addition, there were construction workers, rig engineers, drilling engineers who carried out the construction of the first production facilities on stilts.

Preparatory work for drilling the first exploratory well at Oil Rocks began in June 1949. To create a bridgehead for drilling, the Chvan ship, which had served its time, was used, towed to the Oil Stones zone and sunk at a given point. On August 24, 1949, the brigade of the future Hero of Socialist Labor Mikhail Kaverochkin began drilling the first well, which produced the long-awaited oil on November 7 of the same year. The well had a depth of about 1000 m, and its daily production rate was 100 tons of fountain oil. In honor of this event, it was decided to rename “Black Stones” to “Oil Stones”.

Later, to build a bridgehead for drilling the second well, 7 more old ships, almost unsuitable for sailing, were brought there and half-flooded. So the artificial “Island of the Seven Ships” was born, where six months later, oil was already extracted.

The second well, drilled by the brigade of another Hero of Socialist Labor Kurban Abbasov, with approximately the same production rate as the first, was commissioned in the first half of 1950.

In 1951, the industrial development of Oil Rocks began. In 1952, for the first time in world practice, the construction of an overpass began, which was supposed to connect artificial metal islands. Oil is produced from more than 20 horizons, which is a unique phenomenon. Since 1949, 1940 wells have been drilled at the field, producing 60% of all Soviet offshore oil. At the end of the 90s. the well stock amounted to 472, of which 421 were operating. The average daily production level is −1800-2000 tons of oil, 50% of the wells are watered. The remaining recoverable oil reserves at the field amount to 21 million tons. The field is connected to the mainland by an 78 km long underwater oil pipeline with a diameter of 350 mm. In the late 1990s. 2 thousand people worked here.

In February 1951, the first tanker with oil from the Oil Rocks oil field was unloaded at the berth of the oil loading port of Dubendi. The subsea oil pipeline from Oil Rocks, which currently supplies oil to shore, was only built in 1981.

Currently ^{[ what? ]} Oil Rocks are more than 200 stationary platforms, and the length of the streets and lanes of this city in the sea reaches up to 350 kilometers. Over the past years, more than 160 million tons of oil and 13 billion m³ of associated petroleum gas have been produced at this field. More than 380 production wells operate here, each of which produces an average of up to 5 tons of oil per day.

It was on Oil Stones that the full cycle of offshore operations was first based: from the search for oil and gas to the delivery of finished products, from experiments in the field of marine engineering to its mass development and implementation. In the process of conducting exploration and maintenance work on the Oil Rocks, an entire school for the training of scientific personnel was formed. In practice, the latest ideas and developments of scientists were carried out, and oil workers gained professional experience and skills in the most difficult marine conditions. Oil specialists working at the oil company later went to work at the fields of Kazakhneft, Turkmenneft, Dagnefte, Tatneft, Bashneft, etc.

For the first time in the USSR, on Oil Rocks, a method of drilling several directional wells from one base was tested. In the future, this method of cluster drilling was widely used in other oil fields of the USSR. A new flyover method for developing the Oil Rocks field is still considered the first in the world and has no analogues.

In 1960, the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, N. S. Khrushchev, visited Oil Stones and quickly resolved two serious problems of the field: he ordered the shift to be shipped from the shore to the field by helicopters; at that time it was MI-4, and later MI-8 (before that people, products, all kinds of goods were delivered from the coast only by sea) and ordered to build 5-9-storey buildings on bulk grounds (before his visit, 1- 2-storey houses on stilts). Thus, an important housing problem for oil shift workers was solved: at the very first time working on the Oil Rocks, oil workers lived in the cabins of old ships flooded near islets.

In November 2007, a new platform No. 2387 was commissioned at Oil Stones for the drilling of 12 wells. The height of the two-block platform reaches 45 m, weight - 542 tons. The platform is installed at a depth of 24.5 m. The life of the blocks assembled at the Baku Deep Water Base Plant is envisaged for 50 years. It is planned to drill 12 new wells from this platform at an average depth of 1800 m.

On December 25, 2007, a 20-inch gas pipeline was commissioned connecting 66.6 km of Oil Stones and Bahar fields with a throughput of 5.5 million cubic meters per day. This pipeline is designed to transport natural gas produced at the Gunashli field to the shore.

In the second half of the 2000s, the dormitories for workers were overhauled, the park was broken, the memorial to the victims of the tragedy of 1957 was replaced (when more than 20 people died during a severe storm), the monument to the first oil well was updated, the memorial to the oil workers - victims of the Karabakh conflict , was built, a monument to the geologist Aga-Kurban Aliyev was erected, a monument to Heydar Aliyev and his museum was opened.

In the village there is a bakery, a clinic, a tea house, a dining room, a water treatment station, a waste incinerator, and a football pitch. Workers live in dormitories (male and female) in rooms of one to two people.

Until the mid-2000s, a mosque with a full-time mullah operated on the Oil Rocks, but was closed due to the tightening of the security regime. For the same reason, excursions to Oil Rocks were prohibited.

Transport communication is provided by ferry flights from the sea terminal in Baku , cargo and passenger flights from the terminal on the Absheron Peninsula and helicopters from the heliport on the island of Pirallahi . There are several helipads on the Oil Rocks themselves, one of which is the main one with a small airport terminal .

There are no permanent residents on Oil Rocks, about two thousand people work on a rotational basis on a weekly / weekly schedule. It is strictly forbidden to extend the period of shift; the only exception is the period of stormy weather when transport links to the mainland are impossible. In this case, the shift is automatically extended for a week.

All Oil Stone workers are paid higher than their mainland counterparts. A working shift averages 10-12 hours. In addition to the oil industry workers, builders, geologists and representatives of other related professions work on the Oil Rocks.

The operation of Oil Stones is carried out by Azneft, one of the SOCAR divisions.

• Baku and oil. Soviet period
• An article about the catastrophic storm on Oil Rocks of 1956 in the journal Science and Life
• Story about the trip to the Oil Rocks in 2013 and their stories
• Pictures of Oil Rocks 2013
• Mir-Yusif Mir-Babaev. A brief history of Azerbaijani oil. Baku, Azerneshr, 2007
• Mir-Babaev M.F. Oil Stones - a phenomenon of the Caspian Sea (on the 60th anniversary of the opening of a new page in the world history of oil production) - "Azerbaijan Oil Industry", 2009, No. 11, pp. 79-85.
• Mir-Babayev MF Oil Rocks: the first city on the Caspian Sea - “Reservoir”, Canada, 2012, Volume 39, Issue 4, April, p. 33-36.
• Neft Daşları (azerb.)
• Oil bottom
• Oil Stones
• Oil stones: a city on stilts on the high seas