Iran’s natural gas export to Turkey declined by 70% in August compared to the corresponding month in the previous year.
According to Energy Today, the latest report issued by Ankara-based Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) indicates that the National Iranian Gas Company’s export to the neighbor dropped to160 million cubic meters in August.
Although daily supplies to Turkey should be between 25 million cubic meters and 30 mcm on average during the summer, the figure was as low as 6 mcm/d in August.
The report said NIGC's total gas export to Turkey in the first eight months of the current year also dropped by 10% reaching 4.5 billion cubic meters. The figure was 6 bcm in 2017.
EMRA also said that in the past eight months, Turkey bought less than 2.1 million tons of crude oil from Iran, while the volume in the same period last year was 5.16 million and more than seven million tons in 2017.
Turkey is one of Iran’s major trading partners in the region, which has come under pressure from Washington to stop working with Tehran under a fresh wave of US economic sanctions against Iran.
Iran’s trade with Turkey reached $4.47 billion during the first eight months of 2019 to register a decline of 33.87% compared to the corresponding period of 2018, data released by Turkish Statistical Institute show.
No Assurance
Energy experts including Omid Shokri Kalehsar, an independent expert on energy security in Washington, says for now Turkey will continue importing Iranian gas to meet its high demand in the cold winter seasons in the southern regions. However, there is no assurance that the agreement with the Turks (valid until 2026) will survive long into the future.
Turkey has started importing gas from Azerbaijan via the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and is due to import Russian gas from the land-based TurkStream gas pipeline soon.
In 2018, Iran accounted for 9 bcm of the total gas imported by Turkey.
Iran, which started selling gas to Turkey in 2001, is the second largest gas supplier to the country after Russia, delivering close to 10 billion cubic meters annually.
NIGC signed a contract in 1996 to export up to 10 bcm of gas a year to Turkey over 25 years.
Iran reportedly sold $14.2 billion worth of natural gas to Turkey between 2012 and 2016. But Turkey's state-owned oil and gas company Botas appealed in 2016 to the International Court of Arbitration saying that Tehran had overcharged.
The court ruled in 2017 that Iran should reimburse Turkey by $1.9 billion, or about 13% of total sales.
The price of Iranian gas was not officially disclosed, but according to media reports, it was higher than the price of Russian and Azeri gas.
