Türkiye has ramped up the daily production of natural gas in its offshore Sakarya gas field, the largest discovery in the Black Sea, to approximately 4 million cubic meters (mcm) said the CEO of Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) Wednesday.

Türkiye is on course with phase one of the field's production goal to initially produce 10 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.

"We will move forward by optimizing and better understanding the realities of reservoir capacity in the field," Melih Han Bilgin, TPAO CEO, said during the Petroleum and Natural Gas Congress and Exhibition of Türkiye (IPETGAS 2023) held in the capital Ankara.

Stating that Türkiye has reached an important point in natural gas and oil production, Bilgin recalled that the world's largest offshore discoveries were made in the Black Sea.

Bilgin also confirmed that production in the field would gradually increase.

In August 2020, 320 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas were discovered in the Tuna-1 well in the Sakarya field, making it the country's largest gas discovery in history.

With an additional 85 billion cubic meters discovered in October 2020, the total quantity of discovered gas reserves reached 405 bcm.

Following the discovery of 135 billion cubic meters from the Amasra-1 well in June 2021, Black Sea gas reserves totaled 540 billion cubic meters.

In December last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the country’s drillship Fatih had discovered an additional 58 bcm of natural gas reserves at 3,023 meters (9,917 feet) at the Çaycuma-1 block in the Black Sea.

A re-evaluation of gas reserves found that the country's total gas reserves reached 710 billion cubic meters at the end of 2022, with a market value estimated at $1 trillion.