Abstract
An Evaluation of Turkey’s Strategy for Being an Energy Hub from the Aspect of Natural Gas Sector
The geopolitical position of Turkey, which is not rich in hydrocarbon resources, between rich resource geographies and energy customer markets, offers opportunities for Turkey. Based on this fact, Turkish governments have been declaring their goal of turning the country into an “energy hub” for a long time. The steps taken in this direction since the 1990s were strengthened with new and more comprehensive projects in the 2000s. The increasing importance of natural gas among hydrocarbon resources is due to the increase in demand for this resource type. There has been a stable and significant increase in the share of natural gas in Turkey's total energy consumption and in Europe's energy consumption in the last thirty years. This brings the issue of natural gas security to the fore for all importing states. Turkey, in order to transform its advantage arising from its geopolitical position into concrete output within the framework of this need; It has resorted to ways such as being a stakeholder in the construction of new pipelines, hosting some of these lines, concluding new natural gas agreements, and increasing its storage capacity. It has also achieved successful results. In this direction, it has provided new cooperation opportunities with Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation, and has achieved positive results in terms of both its own supply security and the supply security of Europe as a transit country. But the strategy of becoming an energy cluster is a further and bigger goal. Within this study, the background and current situation on this subject are revealed, and a limited future inference is reached.
Keywords
Natural Gas Sector, Energy Security, TANAP, Energy Hub