Can Turkey break its Russian gas habit?
With no end to bilateral tensions in sight, Turkey is making plans to significantly cut down Russia’s majority share of its natural gas supply.
Scrambling to reduce its gas dependence on Russia, Turkey has moved to speed up the construction of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), designed to carry Azeri gas to Europe via Turkey, and set up three new liquefied natural gas facilities.
According to the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK), Russia provided Turkey 26.97 billion cubic meters of gas in 2014, or 54.8% of the total import of 49.26 billion cubic meters. Iran was second with 8.93 billion cubic meters, followed by Azerbaijan with 6.1 billion. Turkey imported also 4.18 billion cubic meters of gas from Algeria, 1.41 billion cubic meters from Nigeria and 1.69 billion cubic meters from the spot market. The EPDK has yet to reveal the 2015 statistics, but according to the head of the Natural Gas Distributors’ Union, the country’s gas consumption amounted to 47.5 billion cubic meters last year.
