Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar on Tuesday announced the new floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) platform that Türkiye has purchased to ramp up its natural gas production has departed from Singapore.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last weekend announced the acquisition and said the platform is expected to arrive in Türkiye after an approximately two-month journey.
Bayraktar echoed that on Tuesday on social media platform X.
"Our floating production platform has set sail from Singapore to Türkiye. After about two months at sea, it will reach our country," the minister wrote.
The platform is expected in 2026 to commence production of gas the country discovered in the Black Sea over the past few years.
The platform is planned to produce 10 million cubic meters (approximately 353 million cubic feet) of gas per day from the Sakarya field off the northwestern Zonguldak province.
The reserve, which has been discovered gradually since August 2020, is believed to contain 710 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas.
To capitalize on the find, Türkiye launched a drive to build offshore infrastructure, including drilling platforms and pipelines, to facilitate the extraction and transportation to onshore facilities.
Last September, it started pumping gas from the field into the national grid through a pipeline linked to an onshore processing facility.
Once operational, the FPSO will serve as a "base" and could stay in the Black Sea for 15-20 years, Erdoğan said.
"This massive floating industrial facility will produce enough natural gas to meet the needs of 5 million households daily," Bayraktar said.
The output from the Black Sea reserve hovers at around 5.1 million cubic meters per day, enough to meet the needs of 2 million homes, the minister said earlier this month.
The new vessel measures nearly 300 meters in length and 56 meters in width and has a maximum gas processing capacity of 10.5 million cubic meters.
The FPSO platform will process and transmit gas to the shore as part of the Sakarya gas field phase-2 operations, according to Bayraktar's post.
The reserve will meet approximately 30% of the nation's annual gas need once the production reaches total capacity. Türkiye's annual gas consumption exceeds 50 billion cubic meters.
The Black Sea output is aimed to be lifted first to 10 mcm before reaching 40 mcm in the final phase, enough to supply up to 15 million households.
Türkiye is almost entirely dependent on imports to cover its energy needs, which left it vulnerable to rising costs that surged following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Over the years, it expanded its inventory by ramping up its hydrocarbon explorations in the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean to curb external dependence.
The latest addition will bring the number of vessels in Türkiye’s energy fleet to seven. Those include four drillships, namely Fatih, Yavuz, Kanuni and Abdülhamid Han, and two seismic research vessels, the Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa and MTA Oruç Reis.