TANAP construction on schedule, Turkish FM says

The construction of the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) to carry gas from Azerbaijan to Europe via Turkey is on schedule for its 2018 completion, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said during his official visit to Azerbaijan on Friday.

Çavuşoğlu met with his Azeri counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov in the capital Baku where he said,at a joint press conference, that energy relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan are excellent, and that both countries will continue to cooperate on mutual projects including TANAP.

TANAP is an integral part of the larger Southern Gas Corridor, which is projected to carry 16 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from Azerbaijan to Europe via Turkey, beginning in 2018.

The project's capacity is planned to reach 23 bcm by 2023, and 31 bcm by 2026.

As Turkey is an energy dependent country, and meets about 92 percent of its oil and 98 percent of its natural gas demand through imports, Azerbaijan with its vast hydrocarbon reserves in the Caspian region, is strategically important.

Turkey is also key for Azerbaijan to transport its resources to Europe.

Other important projects between the two countries include the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) Natural Gas Pipeline.

The BTC pipeline has a capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day and delivers Azeri light crude through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for further export via tankers.

Since 2006, when the pipeline became operational, it delivered about 2.3 billion barrels of oil from the Ceyhan port in Turkey, located in the south of the country, to the international market, according to BOTAS International Limited, the pipeline company that operates the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) Crude Oil Pipeline.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) gas pipeline, known as the South Caucuses Pipeline, carries around 6.6 billion cubic meters of Shah Deniz natural gas per year gas from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey.

It carried 20.34 million cubic meters (mcm) of gas per day in the first half of 2015, a 14.3 percent increase compared with the same period a year ago when 17.8 mcm of gas was carried, according to BP data from August.