A new high-quality oil field has been discovered in southeastern Turkey. In this respect declaration President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke at the election rally held in Karapınar, the largest solar power plant in Europe, in Konya.
“I want to share a good news. We discovered oil reserves with a production capacity of 100 thousand barrels per day in Judy and Gabar.” According to him, the oil coming out of the new field “has a high quality texture.”
The President said that the oil in Judy and Gabar is at a depth of 2.6 km, it will be produced using hundreds of wells and the reserves will meet one-tenth of Turkey’s daily consumption.
Erdogan also said that the oil well in Gabar will be named after Aybüke Yalçın, a young music teacher killed in the 2017 PKK attack in southeast Turkey.
I hope our new field, Aybüke Yalçın-1 well, produces more oil than is produced across the country.
Erdogan said Turkish authorities are actively working on the country’s energy independence in order to protect their own wealth and stop energy purchases from abroad.
“Despite the opposition’s criticism, we bought drillships. That’s why we started natural gas exploration. With Akkuyu NPP, we currently meet 10% of all our needs. There are of course the second, third and fourth blocks. And that’s not enough… I hope we will stay under the leadership of the country and build a second nuclear power plant.”
The head of state agreed that the second nuclear power plant will be built near the city of Sinop in the north of the country. From now on, according to him, “Turkey will no longer be dependent on others in the energy sector, but will be an energy exporting country.”
On April 30, Turkish Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez announced “big news” about new oil locations in the coming days, without specifying exactly where the raw material is located and what its reserves are.
As of 2022, oil provides a quarter of Turkey’s energy. At the same time, only 7% of consumption is mined in the country – about 3 million tons. Ankara is highly dependent on imports of petroleum and petroleum products in this regard. This situation has developed due to the systematically increasing consumption since 2010, especially diesel fuel – more than half of oil and petroleum products are used in the supply of country vehicles. In addition, Türkiye is the world’s largest consumer of LPG fuel.
At the end of 2021, Turkey’s own oil reserves amounted to approximately 600 million tons. However, Ankara has since announced that several sites have been discovered. At the same time, 100 to 200 wells are drilled annually in the country.
Ankara has imported 25-30 million tons of oil and petroleum products in recent years. The main suppliers are Russia and Iraq. Last fall, the country’s energy market regulatory department reported that, on the backdrop of anti-Russian sanctions imposed by the West, in the first half of 2022, Turkey increased its crude oil imports from Russia by 2.4 times to 5.6 million tons. At the same time, Ankara sharply increased re-exports of Russian oil and oil products: in the January-July period last year, Turkey could have earned up to $2.5 billion from it.