Having started the commercial transfer of Russian gas to Turkey and Europe on Jan. 1, TurkStream has delivered 1 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a statement released Monday by Russian energy firm Gazprom.
"About 54% of this volume was delivered to the Turkish gas market and about 46% to the Turkish-Bulgarian border," the Russian company said.
Inaugurated on Jan. 8 in Istanbul in a grand ceremony with the participation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, TurkStream is an export gas pipeline stretching from Russia to Turkey across the Black Sea through two strings, each with a capacity of 15.75 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year.
One of the strings is designed to bring Russian gas to the Turkish market directly, while the other transports gas out of Turkey and into Bulgaria.
That suggests average flows into Turkey so far of 20 million cubic meters per day or 7.3 bcm on an annualized basis – and 17 million cubic meters per day into Bulgaria, corresponding to 6.2 bcm per year.
The pipeline is planned to replace the Trans Balkan Pipeline (TBP), which had been using Ukraine as a transit to supply gas to Turkey, Bulgaria and Southeast Europe. TurkStream aims to expand the Bulgarian network and connect it to Serbia to transfer the Russian gas to the Serbia-Hungary border.
It is estimated that the annual 25 bcm flowing through the TBP will drop and up to 19 bcm per year will be removed from Ukrainian transit throughout 2020.
