BY MURAT YETKIN
RADIKAL- According to Energy Minister Hilmi Guler, the issue of energy will be Turkey’s greatest advantage in our EU membership talks. In his statement on our energy policy, Guler noted that Turkey has already become an important corridor through which energy reserves are transferred, and explained why the issue of energy plays such a significant role in our relations with the EU:
`Turkey has strategic importance both as a corridor and as a terminal for energy. Ceyhan is already a significant energy terminal. When the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline is complete, we will further strengthen our position on both ends. By the end of June, we’ll have gotten oil flowing from Georgia to Turkey.
‘Turkey also acts both as a corridor and a terminal for natural gas reserves. With the Sahdeniz project, Caspian natural gas will be transferred to and distributed from the port of Ceyhan.
‘Acting as a corridor for energy, Turkey’s natural gas and electricity network will soon be connected with Europe’s. There are currently two intersecting routes for natural gas pipelines in Europe. One extends from Greece to Italy, and the other one (the Nabucco project) extends through Bulgaria-Romania to Austria.
‘For now, we aren’t selling natural gas to Europe. By the year 2020 however, 35 billion cubic meters of Europe’s yearly natural gas demand might be met by Turkey. This capacity may as well be increased to 100 billion.
‘We will also play an active role in the distribution of electricity. We’ve recently begun to buy electricity from Turkmenistan, which means our systems have been connected. We’re also about to join the EU’s Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE).
‘Finally, we will have reached a mutual dependence with the EU. Of course, we’ll have to keep prices at a level reasonable enough for us to compete with Russia, Algeria and Norway.’
Guler referred to Iraq’s electricity demand as an example of Turkey’s chance to be an energy corridor in the region and stated that according to Energy Ministry, in the last one-and-a-half years, Turkey has sold 1 billion kw/h of electricity to Iraq, most of which is being used in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq.
All these statements point out the role Turkey can play in safely transferring energy reserves from the East to the West. Remember that role, in his visit to the military academy in Istanbul last month, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. James Jones emphasized that safeguarding energy resources will be NATO’s most important task as of the year 2020. One of these days, our government will decide whether we should let the US use our Incirlik Airbase for logistical purposes. We have to determine where our national interests lie.