Turkish state firm to drill Black Sea in January
Posted by meb at October 5th, 2009
Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortaklığı, or TPAO, Turkey’s state oil company, will start drilling for crude oil in the Black Sea in January, Chief Executive Officer Mehmet Uysal said last week.
The company has invested $5 billion in the past 10 years to explore the Black Sea and has identified 10 drilling prospects with capacity to cover Turkey’s consumption for 40 years, Uysal said in an interview in Bucharest.
TPAO has Black Sea exploration agreements with Brazil’s state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro, and signed a joint operation accord with Exxon Mobil in November.
“The Black Sea has huge reserves, which will be the main supplier of Europe within 10 or 15 years,” Uysal said. “Our modest estimates for those prospects are 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion cubic meters of gas.”
Once the 10 drilling prospects are proven as oil or gas bearing, TPAO will start production studies, which will take about five to seven years, and by 2017 or 2020 it will start production in those fields, he said.
“Out first aim is to fulfill Turkey’s energy demand,” Uysal said. “Then we will make more investment to expand the fields’ capacity to export to Europe.”
In the next 10 or 15 years Turkey will become a vital energy hub for Europe as an alternative to Russia, from which the European Union now gets a quarter of its natural gas, Uysal said. There are many oil and gas pipeline projects passing through Turkey and “very soon Turkey’s territory will start looking like a spaghetti plate,” he said.
Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline:
The 27-nation EU, which Turkey aspires to join, seeks to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, through projects including the Nabucco pipeline designed to pump gas from the Caspian via Turkey to Europe. Kazakhstan already ships oil through BP’s Baku-Ceyhan link to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
Eni, Italy’s biggest energy company, and Turkey’s Çalık Holding plan to build the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline to carry oil from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The project “can be up and running in five to seven years,” Eni Chief Executive Officer Paolo Scaroni said in Bucharest last week.
“In energy terms Turkey is already part of the EU,” Scaroni said. “Turkey is the most important transit country in the region. It is a matter of geography.”
source: Hurriyet daily news
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