Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced on Friday that his country had discovered 320 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the Black Sea’s Tuna-1 zone, “the largest natural gas reserve” in the country’s history.
The oils deposits found by Turkey are very close to an area where the sea borders of Romania and Bulgaria are are converging and not far away from Romania’s Neptun offshore project, the largest natural oil deposit in the Black Sea discovered by Petrom and Exxon eight year ago.
Erdogan said that “the newly discovered reserves are only a piece of a larger resource,” that will open a “new period” for Turkey and the country “will continue to discover more in the near future.”
The Tuna-1 zone is located off the mouth of the Danube block in the crossroads between Bulgarian and Romanian maritime borders within the inland waters of Turkey.
“Romania has shallow-water gas projects, but a major deep-water find by eight years ago has still to be exploited. A company backed by the Carlyle Group is also exploring off Romania, aiming to get gas in 2021. Rosneft has explored in the Russian part of the Black Sea but without concrete results”, Bloomberg reports.
Turkey’s first seismic vessel, Barbaros Hayrettin Paşa, had earlier carried out seismic surveys in the Black Sea and had identified rich reserves of natural gas in the Danube block in the Turkish waters of the Western Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria have been producing oil and gas for many years in the Danube block.
Turkey’s first oil and gas drilling vessel, Fatih, set sail from northern Turkey’s Trabzon on June 25 this year for its long-awaited drilling mission in the Black Sea following the completion of installation works.