China builds Turkish gas facility
MONTREAL - China's Tianchen Engineering Corp has agreed with Turkey to build an underground natural gas storage facility at Lake Tuz in central Anatolia, south of Ankara. The project will be completed in two stages and be constructed to hold up to 1 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas.
The first 500 million cubic meters (mcm) of storage will be completed by 2015 to enter into service in 2016, with the second 500 mcm to be completed in 2018 for entry into service in 2019. This will nearly double Turkey's natural gas storage capacity to 2.1 bcm, equivalent to 5% of total consumption.
The facility will have an operational life of 10 years and be able to release as much as 40 mcm of gas daily into the Turkish grid. According to Fazil Senel, director of Turkey's state pipeline company BOTAS, as reported by Bloomberg News. The estimated cost is US$640 million, to be financed by a World Bank loan signed in 2006.
Bilateral relations between China and Turkey were reinvigorated in June 2009 when Abdullah Gul become the first Turkish president to travel to China since 1995, spending nearly a week in the country (visiting Beijing, Xian, Shenzhen, and Urumqi) and signing seven cooperation accords in the fields of banking, culture, energy, and finance.
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