After finding an additional 85 billion cubic metres, the Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that its country has raised the estimated reserves in a gas field off its Black Sea coast to 405 billion cubic metres.
As cited News24xx.com from TOI, in August 2020, the Fatih drill ship made the discovery about 100 nautical miles north of the Turkish coast. And that ship found a field that contained 320 billion cubic metres of gas.
Erdogan said, the found becomes the biggest natural gas discovery in Turkey.
“Work in this borehole has been completed after reaching a depth of 4,775 metres as planned previously.”
And analysts also said the find represents a major discovery and was one of the largest global discoveries in 2020. They revealed that if the gas can be commercially extracted, the discovery could transform Turkey’s dependence on Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan for energy imports. Last year’s imports totalled more than USD 41bn.
Not only the Fatih, another ship named Kanuni, is also headed to the Black Sea for another drilling operations. And the Fatih would start new operations in a different borehole in the same field, called Sakarya, next month after returning to port for maintenance.
The president of Turkey expects the first gas flow from the field in 2023. And more than a quarter of Turkey’s long-term gas contracts expire next year, including imports via pipeline from Russia’s Gazprom and Azerbaijan’s SOCAR and a liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal with Nigeria.
Turkey has also been exploring for hydrocarbons in the Mediterranean, where its survey operations in disputed waters have drawn protests from Greece and Cyprus.
