Oil & Gas 360 Publsihers Note – this is a nice article fro Viktor Katona. Turkey is really pulling all the stops to get a steady supply of natural gas.
Whilst most of European media have narrowed down the deterioration in EU-Turkey relations to the issues of the “refurbished” Hagia Sophia and the protracted Libyan proxy war, their energy ties were just as crippled by Turkey’s intensive drilling campaign in Cyprus’ offshore, generating bad blood between the Old Continent and Ankara. Driven by its purported objective to drill 26 wells in the Eastern Mediterranean, every one of Turkey’s wildcats in Cypriot waters has gauged Europe’s unity and shed light on its ill-preparedness to confront Turkish actions. Now Turkey has started to drill its initial objective along its northern coast, the Black Sea – the one offshore area that is undeniably Turkish. The reticence of Turkish authorities to drill their Black Sea first might explain a lot as to why drilling in the Mediterranean might be more beneficial.
The Turkish Fatih drillship has started prospecting works within Turkey’s Black Sea shelf this July and is assumed to have spud the Tuna-1 wildcat on July 20. Tuna-1 will be drilled in water depth of more than 2km, having been pinpointed as a potential drilling site following 3D seismic surveying in the area in April-May 2019 (by means of the Polar Empress vessel). The location of the Tuna-1 well is peculiar as TPAO has decided to go at it right next to the quadrangle of the Romanian-Bulgarian-Ukrainian-Turkish maritime border, within the deepwater Block 26. It seems that the wildcat’s location not far away from Ukraine’s Skifsky block and (perhaps more importantly) from the largest-so-far offshore discovery of the Black Sea deepwater, the OMV-operated Neptun field in Romania, is a deliberate attempt to maximize the success potential of the well by drilling as close as possible to proven commercial discoveries.
At first glance, TPAO is taking the correct step politically – it was the Fatih drillship that has become Turkey’s first-ever own drillship (until 2018 the vessel was operated on the Norwegian Continental Shelf), it was the first to drill a Turkish wildcat in the Eastern Mediterranean (in waters that are internationally recognized as belonging to Cyprus). Moving the ominous drillship into waters that are actually internationally recognized as Turkish alone might shift the prevailing focus a bit. As of today, TPAO owns 2 similar drillships – Yavuz (the sister ship of Fatih) and Kanuni (built a year after the two in 2012, also in South Korea) – so continuing its objectionable drilling program in the Eastern Mediterranean need not come at the detriment of other activities in the Black Sea.
for the rest of the story: Oilprice
By Viktor Katona for Oilprice.com
