Turkey’s energy minister warns of threat to oil and gas supplies after tankers targeted

ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey’s energy minister issued a call for the supply of oil and gas in the Black Sea to be protected after three Russian tankers were targeted off the Turkish coast.

Alparslan Bayraktar said Turkey was concerned not just by the threat to shipping but also to two undersea pipelines, Blue Stream and Turk Stream, that carry natural gas from Russia to Turkey.

Referring to the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany, Bayraktar pointed out Turkey’s reliance on imported gas.

“We call on all parties to keep the energy infrastructure out of this war because it’s part of people’s daily lives,” he said during a news conference Wednesday. “We need to keep the energy flows uninterrupted in the Black Sea and the (Bosphorus and Dardanelles) straits.”

Ukraine said its naval drones struck two tankers on Nov. 28. The third vessel was struck Tuesday as it headed toward the Turkish port of Sinop. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the earlier attacks as a threat to “navigational safety, life and the environment, especially in our own exclusive zone.”

Russian oil and gas provide nearly half of Turkey’s total energy needs. The NATO member has come under pressure from Washington to reduce its reliance on Russia ’s hydrocarbons.

When Erdogan visited Donald Trump in September, the U.S. president urged him to ease ties to Moscow, including in the energy sector. During the same trip, Turkish companies signed a multibillion-dollar deal with U.S. firms to buy liquefied natural gas.

Defending Turkey’s purchase of Russian oil and gas, Bayraktar said Russia had proved to be “a very reliable supply to the Turkish market” since Turkish households started switching to gas in the 1980s.

He said, however, “it’s not a secret that we need to have a balanced supply portfolio. We don’t want to rely on one supply country or a few countries.”

Turkey was “trying to diversify our supply countries and get competitive gas,” Bayraktar added.

Turkey’s state-owned oil and gas company, BOTAS, recently finalized a contract with Russia’s Gazprom to supply gas, the minister said.

Turkey also is engaged with Russia in nuclear energy. Rosatom, a Russian state corporation, is building a nuclear power plant on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

The Akkuyu power plant’s four reactors are expected to generate around 10% of Turkey’s electricity when it comes online. However, the project has been beset by delays exacerbated by sanctions imposed on Russian entities in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The first electricity from Akkuyu would be produced next year, Bayraktar said.

The project’s administrators had turned to China to provide components that western companies were unwilling to offer due to sanctions, but it still suffers financing issues including $2 billion “stuck in JP Morgan for a long time” when the West froze Russian assets, Bayraktar said.

“We need to play a moderator role to help release this money because this is going to be used in the project,” he added.