With engineering work already underway, Turkey aims to develop its natural gas field in the Black Sea with a suitable model and prepare it for production, the country’s energy and natural resources minister said Friday.

“Our goal is to bring this gas to our coast and connect it to the system by 2023, the 100th anniversary of our Republic," Fatih Dönmez said in a statement.

Turkey says the discovery, the largest in the country’s history, which was announced last month, contains 320 billion cubic meters (bcm) of recoverable gas. The field is located in the Tuna-1 location of the Sakarya Gas Field in the Black Sea.

“High volume production at such sites does not occur in the first phase. The production planning itself is an optimization job. We anticipate that we will need a certain period of time to get to the highest level of production, but in 2023, we will make the first delivery of gas on land,” Dönmez said.

“We plan to drill 30 to 40 wells in total. Our friends are doing this work right now. We do not see any problem, God willing, we will extract it," he said.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in August also said Turkey would start pumping gas from the Black Sea field by 2023.

(c) Daily Sabah

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