Russia’s Gazprom has quietly shelved Turkey gas hub plan, says report

Russia’s Gazprom has quietly shelved plans to develop a gas distribution hub in Turkey, Bloomberg reported on June 3.

With Turkey connected to Russia’s TurkStream and Blue Stream trans-Black Sea pipelines, Gazprom looked at the country as an option for restoring lost gas volumes piped to Europe. European countries made up Russia’s largest gas export market prior to the Febuary 2022 Kremlin invasion of Ukraine and the consequent shunning by most of Europe of Russian gas shipments available by pipeline. However, Bloomberg reported that after months of mulling options, Gazprom concluded that the Turkey plan was not viable. Work on it has largely come to a halt, unnamed people familiar with the matter, cited by the news service, said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin as recently as last October publicly endorsed the potential of the Turkey hub plan. But a difficulty with the project, as explained by the reported statements of the sources, is that Turkey lacks spare export-pipeline capacity into bordering gateways to southern Europe, Greece and Bulgaria. At the same time Ankara stands unwilling to let Gazprom market any hub gas jointly, meaning Russian influence over the hub would be limited, the people said.

The European Union, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with a proposal to entirely boycott Russian gas imports by the end of 2027—though there are projections that in 2025 the European Union is set to spend more on Russian gas and raw materials, at more than $20bn, than on Ukrainian military aid.

Turkey is ambitious to create a gas hub that would re-export gas from countries including Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and boast its own price index. Even Iranian gas could one day flow through such a hub should the US allow presently sanctioned Iran to be brought in from the cold, while liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes from Qatar, the US, Algeria, Nigeria and other providers could undergo regasification for piping through the hub. Bringing gas up to Turkey via a pipeline laid from Qatar to the country, via Syria, is, however, a distant, and quite possibly infeasible prospect.

Turkey itself is oil and gas poor.

The 17^th EU sanctions package adopted against Russia on May 20 includes the bloc’s most extensive effort yet to curb Russia's energy revenues, with a particular focus on the so-called "shadow fleet" of vessels used by Moscow to circumvent existing sanctions.