Turkey on Friday will inaugurate its first publicly owned floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), Energy and Natural Resources Minister Fatih Dönmez said Wednesday.
The ceremony for the Ertuğrul Gazi will be presided over by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Dönmez told a meeting in the capital, Ankara.
The FSRU arrived in late April and is anchored at the port in Dörtyol in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay.
Dönmez said Ertuğrul Gazi would be the first FSRU ship to fly the Turkish flag.
The vessel has been named after the father of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire.
The vessel can store 170,000 cubic meters (6 million cubic feet) of liquefied natural gas (LNG), equivalent to 102 million cubic meters in gas form, and has a regasification capacity of 28 million cubic meters per day.
Owned by Turkey's state-owned crude oil and natural gas pipeline company, BOTAŞ, the vessel will connect to facilities in Hatay province and be able to meet the household energy demand of the Hatay and Osmaniye provinces for one year.
Ertuğrul Gazi joins other two FSRUs in the country.
One is anchored in the industrial Aliağa district of western Izmir and the other is also in Hatay’s Dörtyol district.
In 2019, the larger capacity FSRU in Aliağa had replaced Turkey’s first FSRU that entered service in 2016.
The first LNG floating vessel had a storage capacity of 139,000 cubic meters and was able to provide 14 million cubic meters of gas to the Turkish network per day.
Solar energy breaks record in May
Dönmez also spoke of Turkey’s ongoing efforts to add more renewables and local energy resources to its energy mix through public and private sector cooperation along with collaboration with universities.
"We managed to break several records in renewable energy in 2021 when 96.8% of installed capacity that came online in the first five months of the year came from renewable resources," he said.
By the end of May, renewables constituted 52.6% of the nation’s total installed capacity and local resources constituted 64.2%. 56% of all electricity production came from local resources, he noted.
"The share of wind energy in total installed capacity reached 9.9% and Turkey is getting closer to 10,000 megawatts of installed capacity in wind step by step," he underlined.
In May, Turkey broke a monthly solar energy record when the country produced 1,468 gigawatt-hours of solar power, marking a 5.8% share of overall power production.
Mining contribution to economy quadruples
Dönmez also noted that mining has quadrupled its contribution to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 10 years, reaching TL 46.7 billion from nearly TL 11-12 billion.
This mining share now stands at 1.1%, but according to Dönmez, this will increase in the coming years.
The share of mining out of total exports reached 2.52% from 2.39% a year ago, showing the sector’s resilience to tough conditions like COVID-19, he said.
"We will continue to be in close contact with representatives from the sector and provide any public sector support for its expansion," he concluded.