Türkiye signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with China to cooperate on the energy transition, a top official announced on Tuesday during a visit to the country.
In a statement on social media, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said that during the visit to Beijing, he met with Zhang Jianhua, the head of China's National Energy Administration, and they discussed potential areas of collaboration, particularly in nuclear and renewable energy.
"With the MoU on cooperation in the energy transformation, we aim to implement concrete projects as soon as possible," Bayraktar said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In a meeting with the natural resources minister of the People's Republic of China, Wang Guanghua, Bayraktar stated that they hoped to enhance cooperation for the development of natural resources and mining, especially critical minerals and rare earth elements, both in their respective countries and in third countries.
The minister during the visit held meetings with representatives of several companies operating in the energy field including State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC), Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) as well as officials from CNOS, one of China's leading nuclear companies.
Following the contacts, Bayraktar told Anadolu Agency (AA) and public broadcaster TRT that the cooperation between Türkiye and China in the field of energy has spread to many areas: nuclear energy, renewable energy, energy storage and especially in critical minerals, and that he visited Beijing to enhance this cooperation and to carry out more concrete projects.
He reported they agreed to sign a cooperation agreement in the field of natural resources by October and that they started working related to this issue.
Referring to the memorandum signed on energy transformation, the minister said, "This will pave the way for us to jointly develop very important projects on our country's path to decarbonization, especially renewable energy."
Bayraktar further stated that within the scope of his contacts in Beijing, he first met with SPIC officials, with whom Türkiye has been working in the nuclear field to date, and discussed the next steps in the cooperation.
"As Türkiye, in our long-term energy plan, we aim to reach an installed capacity of 20,000 megawatts in nuclear energy by 2050, in terms of both our climate targets and our country's long-term sustainable energy security. As you know, we have one ongoing project right now," he said.
"We have the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) project, which is under construction. In addition, we want to build two more large-scale nuclear power plants, one in Sinop and one in Thrace," he added.
"Our negotiations with the Chinese company (SPIC) for the Thrace project have been continuing for many years. The pandemic process slowed us down a lot. There were problems in departure and arrival at that time, but now we have accelerated this process a little more and we want to expedite it further."
