Turkey is preparing to take its first delivery from a large natural gas discovery in the Black Sea as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seeks to burnish his credentials just weeks before a tightly contested election.
Turkish Petroleum, the state oil and gas company, will on Thursday flip the switch on the Sakarya gasfield development, roughly three years after making the find, according to its chief executive, Melih Han Bilgin.
The first deliveries from Turkey’s most ambitious energy production project come just ahead of the May 14 presidential election, in which Erdoğan is locked in a close race against his chief opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Erdoğan last month said that the government would cut gas bills for consumers and businesses as part of a push to ease cost pressures at a time when inflation is running above 50 per cent.
Turkey is a big energy importer and nearly all the gas it consumes comes from abroad, making the Sakarya project a significant boost for the country’s energy sector. Turkey’s net energy imports, which include oil, gas and other products, were worth $80bn last year, an important driver of its yawning current account deficit, central bank data shows.
Turkish Petroleum will begin this week delivering gas from three wells at the ultra-deep Sakarya gasfield, Bilgin said last Thursday at a vast onshore processing facility near the Black Sea town of Filyos, where workers were racing to prepare for this week’s launch ceremony.
Up to 710bn cubic metres of recoverable natural gas was discovered in the Black Sea, most of which is in the Sakarya field, according to Turkish Petroleum.
Turkey is developing the project with a consortium that includes US oilfield services group Schlumberger and UK-headquartered Subsea 7.
The facility would begin producing 10mn cubic metres of gas per day once a further seven wells go into operation in September, Bilgin said. That would amount to about 7 per cent of Turkey’s overall gas consumption last year, according to Financial Times calculations based on Energy Market Regulatory Authority data.
Some of the gas produced at the site would be exported, Bilgin said, adding that he saw “good potential for the European gas market”. Many governments across the continent remain concerned about next winter’s supplies with big Russian pipelines shut down.
“With the existing market conditions, I think we’re not going to be having any difficulty finding customers,” Bilgin said.
Turkish Petroleum, which spent $1.8bn on the first phase of the project, plans to increase production in coming years.
Bilgin said he hoped that production would reach 40mn cubic metres per day once it is running at full capacity. He declined to comment on how much future phases would cost, but said he was confident Turkish Petroleum could secure financing since gas was considered to be a “transition fuel”.
Separately, Bilgin acknowledged that discounts on Russian energy had boosted Turkish Petroleum’s business, underscoring how Turkey had continued deepening its trade relationships with Moscow despite Ankara’s western allies shunning the country over Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“We have been incorporating [Russian energy] into our business model,” he said, adding that it had been “creating additional margins and additional options for us for sure”.
