Turkey plans to drill deep water oil well in Black Sea in 2018: Minister

ANKARA

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Turkey plans to drill a deep water oil well in the western part of the Black Sea in 2018, Energy Minister Berat Albayrak said Nov. 8, adding that the country was also planning to bring the Akkuyu nuclear power plant online by 2023. 

“In the last 14 years, around $9.3 billion of investment has been made on national oil and gas research and production activities. Between 2017 and 2019, $867 million of domestic investment and $4.31 billion of international investment is planned in the oil and gas sectors,” he said in a presentation to parliament’s planning and budgetary commission.

“In this vein, we are planning to open a sea well in the western Black Sea in 2018 in a bid to discover and make use of the rich hydrocarbon reserves of this area,” he said.

Saying that Turkey’s annual natural gas consumption was around 50 billion cubic meters (bcm), Albayrak noted that the country aimed to increase its annual gas storage capacity to 10 bcm. 

He said they were planning to complete the first phase of a gas storage facility in Tuz Gölü (Salt Lake) in January 2017 and the second phase in 2019.  

“The total storage capacity of this project is slated to be 5.4 bcm and a daily withdrawal capacity of 80 million cubic meters,” he said.        

“We are also planning to start a third phase of expansion working for the North Marmara Natural Gas Storage facility in 2017,” he said, adding that the government’s aim was to establish a gas trading hub in Turkey. 

Turkey expects the first unit of its planned $20 billion Akkuyu nuclear power plant to come online by the end of 2023, said Albayrak.

Work on the Akkuyu plant, which is being built in collaboration with Russia, has accelerated as ties between the two countries were restored following months of tensions after Turkey downed a Russian warplane along its border last year.

Albayrak said Turkey’s installed power capacity increased to 78.072 megawatts (MW) at the end of September, adding that their aim was to increase the share of coal in power generation. 

“We aim at increasing the share of local coal reserves in electricity generation to 60 billion kWh by 2019,” he added. 

Albayrak also hailed Turkey’s renewable energy projects which account for 32.2 percent of electricity generation.        

As part of its 2015-2019 Strategic Plan, the ministry is targeting 32,000 megawatts of production capacity in hydro power, 10,000 megawatts in wind, 1,000 megawatts in geothermal, 3,000 megawatts in solar and 700 megawatts in biomass.        

“In the last decade, some 52 percent of investments in electricity production facilities was made in renewable energy,” said Albayrak.