Turkey has never made a secret of its ambitions to become a regional energy power. Its location between oil and gas producers in the Middle East and the southern Caucasus and consumer countries in the European Union has long been its trump card. But the recent discovery of a large natural gas field off Turkey’s Black Sea shore could prove the real game-changer.
Tuna-1, as the well is known (a reference to the Turkish word for the Danube River, not the fish), holds some 320 billion cubic meters of gas. For perspective, that is around two and a half times the size of the Aphrodite field south of Cyprus, which is the subject of ownership disputes that are one of several triggers for current tensions between Ankara and a Greek-led coalition of Mediterranean countries.
