The number Alparslan Bayraktar gave in Lefkoşa was 101 kilometers, and almost all of it runs under the sea. Türkiye's energy minister used a signing ceremony on Friday to lay out the pipeline that will carry Turkish natural gas to northern Cyprus: 97 km of undersea line, 4 km on land, from Anamur on the Mersin coast to the KIB-TEK Teknecik power plant, the mainstay of the island's grid.
The pipeline was the headline, but the paper signed that day was the frame around it. Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Prime Minister Ünal Üstel put their names to a Memorandum of Understanding on the Supply of Natural Gas to the TRNC, at the Republican Assembly in Lefkoşa. TRNC Assembly Speaker Ziya Öztürkler, Bayraktar, and Türkiye's Lefkoşa ambassador Ali Murat Başçeri were in the room.
The design specifics, from Bayraktar: two lines, each 22 inches across, built to flow both ways. Gas goes to the island now. If a source is ever found in the region, the same pipes could push it back through Türkiye toward Europe. He called the plan bidirectional, north to south and south to north.
The first job is electricity. The gas is meant primarily for power generation, which is the part of the TRNC's economy that has leaned hardest on Türkiye. Bayraktar said the switch to gas would bring the island an abundance of electricity and cut its bill for imported oil products. He put the project in Erdoğan's column and called it, in a phrase the TRNC press ran with, a possible project of the century.
None of this arrives cold. Türkiye already runs a supply relationship across the same stretch of water, and Bayraktar's own line is that the TRNC's energy security is an inseparable part of Türkiye's own. Seven mobile power plants sit at Teknecik, shipped and installed from the mainland; Yılmaz put their combined capacity at 175 megawatts. Turkish state firms have supplied the island's fuel oil since 2021. Yılmaz counted more than 8 billion lira of energy-sector support over five years and called Friday a historic turning point.
The water came first. The Asrın Projesi line has already carried 330 million cubic meters of Anatolian water under the sea to the island, and an undersea electricity cable to Türkiye is the stage after gas. Üstel drew the contrast himself: the cable's feasibility work is done, he said, but it waits on EU and ENTSO-E approval under Greek Cypriot pressure, while the gas pipeline faces no Greek Cypriot or European obstacle. That is his political read, offered as a message in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it belongs to him.
The Greek Cypriot side answered the same day. The Republic of Cyprus foreign ministry called the memorandum another expression of Türkiye's Eastern Mediterranean policy and an attempt to consolidate what it termed faits accomplis of the occupation, according to the Cyprus Mail. It said the deal runs against international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and that Nicosia would take the matter through legal, political, and diplomatic channels, the EU among them. That is the Greek Cypriot government's position, stated here as theirs.
The pipeline sits in a run of Cyprus news Ankara has been steering for weeks. Days earlier, Yılmaz stood beside Üstel to reject the European Parliament's Cyprus resolution as null and void, and Bayraktar toured Teknecik on that same trip.
Bayraktar closed on the date the island marks every summer. He tied the project to the martyrs of the 1974 Cyprus Peace Operation and to 20 July, Peace and Freedom Day, now nine days out. Engineering figures, a signed memorandum, and a pipe under the sea, folded into an anniversary.