Bulgaria’s Energy Minister Rosen Hristov held a meeting in Istanbul with the management of the Turkish State energy company BOTAS, on the occasion of the visit of the Bulgarian delegation, led by President Rumen Radev to Turkey.
Minister Hristov underlined that thanks to the ongoing discussions and the good relationship between President Radev and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “negotiations can start about a systematic supply of gas from Turkey.”
Since the end of April, when Russia halted gas supplies to Bulgaria, the country started to look at other potential suppliers, like Turkey or Greece. The latter is already a success story, after the Greece-Bulgaria interconnector transported a record 303 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of natural gas only in its first days of operations, at the beginning of October. The 182-kilometre gas pipeline is Bulgaria’s direct connection to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The country’s transmission system operator is also considering an expansion of the cooperation with Azerbaijan for the transportation of additional natural gas quantities through their existing networks.
Indeed, the consumption of gas in Bulgaria is expected to rise. Earlier this year, Svetoslav Ivanov, Chairman of the Board of the Bulgarian Natural Gas Association reminded us that over 60 per cent of Bulgarian households use electricity for heating, cooking and hot water and most of that is produced by burning coal. Therefore, to keep the decarbonisation efforts alive, coal must be replaced by natural gas. Turkey has always been a potential supplier, considering the huge amount of natural gas produced in the country. However, due to political disagreements and geopolitical tensions, not many contracts were signed.
Especially under current circumstances, the role that Turkey can play as a gas hub is making the headlines: earlier in October, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed that Moscow could export more gas via Turkey and turn it into a new supply hub. In fact, since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has continued gas deliveries via the TurkStream gas pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 31.5 billion cubic metres (bcm). The question now is: can Turkey become Europe’s gas hub without relying on Russian supplies?
However, there is more to gas and, during the recent meeting between Minister Rosen Hristov and the general director of BOTAS, Burhan Yozcan, also opportunities for cooperation in the field of green hydrogen production and carbon capture and utilisation were discussed.
