There is large gas resource potential in western Turkey, according to Canadian energy company Valeura in its latest report shared with company officials on Nov. 15.
The report shows that Valeura Energy will drill more wells in Turkey to discover natural gas and oil. It said that so far more than 900 wells have been drilled in the Thrace Basin and more than 40 fields have been discovered, according to information gathered by Anadolu Agency (AA) from the report.
"Conventional gas fields are generally small, but there has been production of gas and oil from the basin for the past 50 years," the company said.
The company's plans come at a time when the Turkish government aims to fully liberalize the gas market.
To support this goal, the Organized Natural Gas Wholesale Market (ONWM) regulation was published in September 2017 and came into force in September 2018. The company cited excellent fiscal terms, immediate access to growing infrastructure and a supportive business climate as some of the best reasons to work in Turkey.
It surmised that Turkey has a strong infrastructure to support major gas projects like the TurkStream natural gas pipeline that will carry 31.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Turkey and Europe.
This infrastructure will also uphold the country's strategy to become an "energy hub" between gas supplies to the east and gas demand from Europe in the west, the company said.
The company noted that Turkey is currently building import pipelines with sufficient capacity to exceed domestic demand projections.
The existing export line to Greece from Turkey and the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) will also allow for greater gas exports, the company said.
Valeura Energy has determined that the Thrace Basin in Turkey could be a basin-centered gas accumulation (BCGA) point.
BCGA's are "potentially, one of the more economically important unconventional gas systems in the world," the company explained and noted that up to 15 percent of the U.S.' total gas production comes from BCGA basins. The company declared that strong evidence exists to support the theory that the Thrace Basin is a BCGA with geological models from almost 1,000 wells in the basin.
"There are normally pressured gas fields around the basin. Numerous gas fields produce from normally pressured reservoirs in the same formations. BCGA typically has significant thickness of low permeability reservoir," it said.
The company also detailed its appraisal program for the Thrace Basin.
According to the program, five wells will be worked on in 2019. The company will begin tests at the end of 2018 at the Yamalık-1 well. In addition, drill testing will commence at İnanli-1, Devepınar-1 and the Hayrabolu-10 wells with further deep-well drill testing planned in 2019.
Valeura said that the Granite Wash area in the U.S. Anadarko Basin is comparable to the Thrace BCGA with respect to depth, stacked pay, overpressure, geological deposition, reservoir quality and mineralogy.
The Granite Wash can be found in Anadarko Basin straddling the Texas-Oklahoma border where over 18,000 vertical and horizontal wells were drilled up to 2010.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Granite Wash had 8.8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas as of Jan. 1, 2013.