Türkiye aims to make Ceyhan a Mediterranean oil trading hub

ANKARA

Türkiye aims to develop the oil terminals at Ceyhan on its Mediterranean coast into a regional center for storing, trading and pricing crude and petroleum products, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said.

“We can make Ceyhan something akin to Rotterdam,” Bayraktar said in a televised interview. “Our goal is to turn it into a center where oil and petroleum products are stored, traded and priced.”

The Ceyhan area is the Mediterranean endpoint of both the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and Iraq-Türkiye crude oil pipelines. Expanded flows from Iraq form a central part of Ankara’s plans for the terminal.

Under a one-year agreement signed on Aug. 1, Iraq secured 750,000 barrels per day of capacity on the Iraq-Türkiye pipeline.

Bayraktar estimated that the arrangement could generate about $500 million a year in transit revenue for Türkiye.

The pipeline system currently has a capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day. Türkiye wants to extend the route south to Basra, where most Iraqi oil is produced, and raise its capacity to 2.5 million barrels per day.

Crude from other regional producers, including Kuwait, could eventually be carried through the same route, Bayraktar said.

The BTC pipeline already delivers around 550,000 to 600,000 barrels per day to Ceyhan.

Combined with expanded Iraqi flows, oil trade through the terminal could eventually reach between 3 million and 3.5 million barrels per day, according to the minister.

Bayraktar said additional storage, refining and petrochemical capacity would support Ceyhan’s development into a full-scale trading center.

Türkiye is also expanding its involvement in Iraqi oil production. State-owned Turkish Petroleum Corporation recently acquired a 15 percent stake in BP Energy Company of Kirkuk Limited, joining BP and ConocoPhillips in a consortium developing fields estimated to contain around 3 billion barrels of oil equivalent.