GAS TRADE CENTER TO BE CREATED IN Türkiye IN 2025

A gas trading center as part of the international gas hub project will open in Istanbul in 2025, Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said in an interview with the Milliyet daily.

“During 2025, we will create a powerful infrastructure that, in cooperation with Botas and Gazprom, will operate the trading platform in the financial center of Istanbul. We have sent them a memorandum of understanding,” Bayraktar said.

According to him, the Istanbul gas index will function at the center of trade and Russia will be able to tell customers what it sells according to a formula oriented to it.

In September 2023, Gazprom handed over to the Turkish state-owned energy transport company Botas a “road map” for the creation of a gas hub in the Thrace region (the European part of Turkey, not far from the already operating gas receiving point of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in Kıyıköy).

Russian President Vladimir Putin first proposed the creation of a new gas hub in Turkey in October 2022, after the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which supplied gas to Germany and other EU countries, was blown up in the Baltic Sea and has not yet been put into service. operation "Nord Stream 2".

The Russian president later explained that this project would allow to reorient transit through the Black Sea, but its implementation also requires the interest of potential gas buyers, especially European countries. In July 2023, he said that the project involves the creation of an electronic trading platform and not the storage of large volumes of gas.