Turkey's natural gas import from Iran was halted for the tenth time on March 31 following an explosion in a pipeline 1.5 km inside Turkey near the border with Iran, director of dispatching at the National Iranian Gas Company said.
“Gas flow to the neighboring country, which started in 2001, has been interrupted at least 10 times mostly due to terrorist attacks in Turkey,” Mehdi Jamshidi Dana was quoted as saying by IRNA.
Sabotage is common on pipelines going into Turkey from Iran and Iraq, where the Kurdistan Workers' Party group or PKK is based. The outlawed group has waged an armed struggle against the Turkish state since 1984. Ankara has banned the Kurdish group as a terrorist organization.
No explosion was recorded during the first five years (2001 to 2005), but a series of bomb attacks started in 2006 and the pipeline was targeted three time in the same year, he added.
The pipeline was sabotaged five times in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011.
There were no attacks between 2012 and 2014. Nonetheless, gas export to Turkey discontinued again in 2016 because of another attack for which PKK claimed responsibility.
According to Jamshidi Dana, on March 31 the pipeline was exploded for the tenth time inside Turkish territory, halting the flow in a 40-inch pipeline.
Local authorities said the blast hit a section of the pipeline near the Gurbulak Border Crossing in the eastern province of Agri.
“Repairs to the pipeline are expected to take around 10 days to complete and gas flow will resume once Turkey's Botas, the country's gas importing company, is ready to receive gas.”
Turkey buys around a quarter of its 40 billion cubic meters of piped natural gas a year from Iran, making its eastern neighbor the second biggest supplier after Russia. Natural gas is used for almost half of Turkey's electricity generation.
NIGC uses IGAT-9 with a length of 1,900 km to transfer gas from Asalouyeh, Bushehr Province, to Bazargan district in the northwestern province of West Azarbaijan, which then extends into Turkish territory.
IGAT is a series of nine large diameter pipelines built to supply gas from refineries in the south (Khuzestan and Bushehr provinces).
No Guarantee
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 guarantee 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.
Iran is the second largest gas supplier to the country after Russia, delivering close to 9 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. Botas in 2016 appealed 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.
