In a year since its inauguration, Turkey’s first publicly owned floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) has transmitted around 2.1 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to the national grid system, a statement from the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry said Friday.
Put into service in June last year, two months after its arrival, Ertuğrul Gazi has been anchored at the port in Dörtyol in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay.
It is the first FSRU ship to fly the Turkish flag and has been named after the father of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire.
Owned by Turkey’s state-owned crude oil and natural gas pipeline company BOTAŞ, Ertuğrul Gazi has completed 24 ship-to-ship transfers of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the ministry said.
The amount it has transmitted to the system is enough to meet a six-month consumption of households in Istanbul, a one-year demand in the capital Ankara or a three-year consumption in the Aegean province of Izmir.
Officials have said the FRSU would add significant flexibility to the country’s energy supply chain security with its 110 million cubic meters of storage and 28 million cubic meters of gasification capacity.
The vessel is said to have the highest gasification capacity among the existing FSRUs in the world.
With speedy integration into the grid system and its ability to mobilize swiftly, the ship can be quickly dispatched to regions where it is needed to supply resource points in areas of high consumption.
The vessel will help ensure that Turkey’s record of uninterrupted power supply will continue. It was initially said to meet 8.2% of the daily natural gas capacity supplied to the grid system.
Ertuğrul Gazi joined other two FSRUs in the country.
One is anchored in the industrial Aliağa district of Izmir and the other is also in Hatay’s Dörtyol district.
In 2019, the larger capacity FSRU in Aliağa had replaced Turkey’s first FSRU that entered service in 2016.
The first LNG floating vessel had a storage capacity of 139,000 cubic meters and was able to provide 14 million cubic meters of gas to the Turkish network per day.
Turkey is also working on plans to expand its Silivri gas storage facility and it plans to commission its new FSRU LNG import terminal on the Gulf of Saros in northwest Turkey.