Türkiye adds another drillship to its fleet

NEŞE KARANFİL- ANKARA

A ship named Mukavemet or Resistance will soon join Türkiye’s fleet tasked to drill the natural gas reserves and transport them to the national natural gas network, Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez has said.

With recent discoveries and re-assessment of earlier findings, Türkiye has around 710 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the Black Sea.

In an interview with a group of reporters, Dönmez informed that the new ship was named after the Turkish Resistance Organization, a group the Turkish Cypriots had established against the Greek Cypriots’ terror attacks in the late 1950s.

“This ship, Mukavemet, has joined our fleet to carry out the operations on the seabed. It will very soon start its operations,” Dönmez told reporters. The Mukavemet is expected to be deployed to the Sakarya Natural Gas Field in February. It can carry out operations up to a depth of 2,200 in the sea.

“This ship is equipped with two cranes to place heavy equipment on the seabed: One with a capacity of 150 tons and the other with a capacity of 40 tons. Plus, a platform is being prepared on the seabed for the operations of underwater robots,” Dönmez informed.

Two underwater robots will be able to work at the same time, and they will be used and controlled remotely by the Turkish engineers, he added.

Türkiye already has more than 50 vessels working for the drilling and transporting the natural gas from the reserves to the natural gas processing center in Filyos in the eastern Black Sea region.

A countdown for pumping the natural gas to the national distribution network is ongoing, with plans to start it at the end of March. The gas will first be transported to Filyos through 170 kilometers of long pipeline. Following the technical procedures, the gas will be transferred to BOTAŞ, the Petroleum Pipeline Corporation, where the gas will be tested. In the first phase, the center will pump around 10 million cubic meters daily, and this amount will be increased to 40 million cubic meters in four years.

HH Most work completed

In the meantime, the chairman and the CEO of Turkish Petroleum, Melih Han Bilgin, informed that most of the work to transport the natural gas to the national system is completed.

“Yes, our job is difficult. Most of the work is done. We have a few weeks left [to accomplish]. Our teams are working day and night in the field and writing history,” Bilgin said.

He also noted that the works at the Filyos center are marking the most important chapters of Türkiye’s development in terms of energy infrastructure.