(MENAFN- AzerNews) By News Center
With initiatives pertaining to the energy sector, Turkiye is
aiming to become a global hub for determining natural gas reference
prices, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
'Our aim is to transform our country into a global center where
the natural gas reference price is determined as soon as possible,'
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a ceremony marking the completion of a
project to expand a subterranean gas storage facility near
Istanbul.
The country's northwestern region of Trakya bordering both
Greece and Bulgaria will become an especially important hub for
both natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) with the
increasing capacity of LNG and underground gas storage, he added at
the event in Silivri.
Erdogan added that Ankara is in contact with Moscow, a major
natural gas producer, and exporter, underlining that they would
take the necessary steps to make Turkiye an energy hub.
Highlighting the importance of storage facilities as European
countries are facing the prospects of energy shortage, Erdogan said
that with the expansion, the Silivri Underground Natural Gas
Storage Facility is now the largest in Europe with a capacity of
4.6 billion cubic meters (bcm).
With the expansion, total natural gas storage capacity increased
by almost 50% in the underground facility, with the amount of gas
stored rising from 3.2 bcm to 4.6 bcm by the year-end, he
added.
Stating that they have provided nearly 85% of the population
with natural gas in 703 settlements in 81 provinces, Erdogan added,
“We have discovered the largest natural gas reserve in our country,
540 billion cubic meters, in the Black Sea. We are carrying out a
feverish activity to transfer this natural gas to our national
grid. At the same time, we are working day and night to share the
good news of new discoveries with our nation. A similar development
is taking place in the field of oil exploration and production. We
both make new drillings and control old wells and bring them into
production. Hopefully, we will increase our daily oil production to
100,000 barrels in a short time, and then we will continue on our
way for greater discoveries and productions.”
On its own, the facility 'will be able to meet a quarter of
demand, even in (periods of) our country's most intensive
consumption,' Erdogan said, adding that up to 45 million cubic
meters of gas can be injected into the Silivri Underground Natural
Gas Storage Facility in a single day.
Turkiye will continue to take all measures to keep at bay the
problems caused by the global energy crisis in Europe in the short
and medium term, and problems that will slow down the development
goals in the long term, Erdogan underlined.
Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had discussed
how the countries work jointly on building a natural gas hub in
Turkiye's Trakya region.
After talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin earlier
this year, Erdogan announced that Ankara and Moscow would work
together to build a natural gas hub in Trakya after a proposal from
Russia.
Turkiye's natural gas demand last year hit 60 billion cubic
meters.
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Tags: recep tayyip erdogan turkiye