Saturday 26 April 2014

TURKEY and its water-strategies


Can Turkey Use Water to Exert Power Across the Middle East?  

Turkey hopes to take a first step  towards long-held ambitions to be a supplier of fresh water across the Middle East.

The first phase of a project to pump fresh water from the Anamur River in southern Turkey to the drought-stricken northern part of Cyprus is slated to be completed this year, according to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Turkish government in Ankara.

Hassan Gungor, undersecretary for the presidency of Northern Cyprus, said the 88-kilometre pipeline “can be taken as a pilot project” that Turkey could replicate across the region.

The 1.2 billion lira (Dh2bn) pipeline, which runs under the Mediterranean, is to bring 75 million cubic metres of water a year to Northern Cyprus, an isolated self-declared republic recognised only by Ankara.

Background Information: 
The Great Water Grab
http://geopoliticsrst.blogspot.com/2012/01/food-for-thought.html

Investing in Water: The Most Profitable Investment of the 21st Century
http://geopoliticsrst.blogspot.com/2012/01/brace-yourself.html

Ankara to boost its role as a regional power by providing water to Middle East countries.

The Turkish ministry for forests and water said in a statement that work will be finished by July 20, the 40th anniversary of Turkey’s 1974 military intervention in Cyprus. Several experts in Turkey said the Cyprus water project could be a first step for Ankara to boost its role as a regional power by providing water to Middle East countries.

“It is technically feasible,” Ibrahim Gurer, a hydrologist at Gazi University in Ankara, said. “And it’s possible not only for Cyprus, but also for other countries like Israel or even Libya. It is not a distant dream.”

In recent years, Turkey’s relative water wealth created problems with several neighbours. Syria and Iraq, which rely on water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers that originate in Turkey, complained that dam projects in Turkey diminish the amount of water that reaches their territories.

Last year, Karim Elewi, an Iraqi member of parliament, accused Turkey of holding back water from the two rivers. But Ankara says water demands by its two southern neighbours are unrealistic.

“The demands of Iraq and Syria [for water from the two rivers] tacitly assume that Turkey releases all the flow of the river without utilising any of it,” the Turkish foreign ministry said on its website.

A US study supported by NASA found last year that 144 cubic kilometres of fresh water in the Eurphrates and Tigris regions had been lost since 2003. The study said that roughly 60 per cent of the loss was caused by pumping water from underground reservoirs.

Factors such as climate change and decreasing water resources were pushing countries in the eastern Mediterranean to think about closer cooperation, said Dursun Yildiz, a water expert at the Working Group on Earth, Water, Energy, a non-governmental group in Ankara.

“Climate change is everybody’s problem,” he said. “We are much closer to each other now.”

Turkey’s fresh water resources have become the subject of ambitious regional plans

Since work on the Cyprus water project started in 2008, Turkey’s government has indicated its readiness to export fresh water to other parts of the Middle East. The water could be provided by rivers running down from the Taurus mountain range in southern Turkey towards the Mediterranean, officials say.

Last year, Shaddad Attili, the water minister of the Palestinian Authority, told Turkish media that Turkey had offered to deliver fresh water to the Gaza Strip by tankers.

The Turkish foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment on water issues.

It is not the first time that Turkey’s fresh water resources have become the subject of ambitious regional plans. In 1986, the Turkish prime minister, Turgut Ozal, proposed to build water pipelines from two rivers in southern Turkey through Syria and Lebanon. The plan, dubbed “Water for Peace” by Ankara, never got traction amid the conflict between Arab countries and Israel.

Background Information: 

“WATER” THE GOLDEN COMMODITY OF THE FUTURE



Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over

There is a tongue-in-cheek saying in America — attributed to Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California water wars — that “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.”

It highlights the consequences, even if somewhat apocryphally, as ever-scarcer water resources create a parched world. California currently is suffering under its worst drought of the modern era.

Adequate availability of water, food and energy is critical to global security. Water, the sustainer of life and livelihoods, is already the world’s most exploited natural resource.

With nature’s freshwater renewable capacity lagging behind humanity’s current rate of utilization, tomorrow’s water is being used to meet today’s need.


Consequently, the resources of shared rivers, aquifers and lakes have become the target of rival appropriation plans. Securing a larger portion of the shared water has fostered increasing competition between countries and provinces.

Efforts by some countries to turn transnational water resources into an instrument of power has encouraged a dam-building race and prompted growing calls for the United Nations to make water a key security concern.

More ominously, the struggle for water is exacerbating impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. Humanity is altering freshwater and other ecosystems more rapidly than its own scientific understanding of the implications of such change.

Degradation of water resources has resulted in aquatic ecosystems losing half of their biodiversity since just the mid-1970s. Groundwater depletion, for its part, is affecting natural streamflows, groundwater-fed wetlands and lakes, and related ecosystems.

The future of human civilization hinges on sustainable development. If resources like water are degraded and depleted, environmental refugees will follow.

Sanaa in Yemen risks becoming the first capital city to run out of water. If Bangladesh bears the main impact of China’s damming of River Brahmaputra, the resulting exodus of thirsty refugees will compound India’s security challenges.

Internal resource conflicts are often camouflaged as civil wars. Sudan’s Darfur conflict, for example, arose from water and grassland scarcity.

Turkey is accelerating its diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

Interstate water wars in a political and economic sense are being waged in several regions, including by building dams on international rivers and by resorting to coercive diplomacy to prevent such construction.

Examples include China’s frenetic upstream dam building in its borderlands, and downriver Egypt’s threats of military reprisals against the ongoing Ethiopian construction of a large dam on the Blue Nile.

Upstream Turkey, inspired by China’s strengthening hydro-hegemony, is accelerating its diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This will exacerbate water stress in the two violence-torn, downriver states of Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, Israel, with its control of the water-rich Golan Heights and the West Bank aquifers, has leveraged its role as water supplier to Palestinians and Jordanians.

Water as a weapon of war or a tool of terrorism 

The yearly global economic losses from water shortages are conservatively estimated at $260 billion.
Water-stressed South Korea is encouraging its corporate giants to produce water-intensive items — from food to steel — for the home market in overseas lands. This strategy has created a grass-roots backlash against South Korean firms in Madagascar and India’s Odisha state.

A report reflecting the joint judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies has warned that the use of water as a weapon of war or a tool of terrorism would become more likely in the next decade.
Water is a renewable but finite resource. Unlike mineral ores, fossils fuels and resources from the biosphere such as fish and timber, water (unless bottled) is not a globally traded commodity. The human population has doubled since 1970 alone, though, while the global economy has grown even faster.
Consumption growth, however, is the single biggest driver of water stress. Rising incomes, for example, have promoted changing diets, especially a greater intake of meat, whose production is notoriously water-intensive.
In China, South Korea and Southeast Asia, traditional diets have been transformed in the past generation alone, becoming much meatier.

If the world stopped diverting food to feed livestock and produce biofuels, it could not only abolish hunger, but also feed a population larger by four billion, according to a University of Minnesota study.
Compounding the diet-change impacts on the global water situation is the increasing body-mass index of humans in recent decades, with the prevalence of obesity doubling since the 1980s.
Obesity rates in important economies now range from 33 percent in the United States and 26.9 percent in Britain to 5.7 percent in China and 1.9 percent in India.
Heavier citizens make heavier demands on natural resources, especially water and energy. They also cause much greater greenhouse-gas emissions through their bigger food and transport needs.
A study published in the British journal BMC Public Health found that if the rest of the world had the same average body-mass index as the United States, it would be equivalent to adding nearly an extra billion people to the global population, with major implications for the world’s water situation.
The issue thus isn’t just about how many mouths there are to feed, but also about how much excess body fat there is on the planet.
The point to note is that a net population increase usually translates into greater human capital to create innovations, power economic growth and support the elderly, but a net increase in body weight only contributes to state liability and greater water stress.
Preventing water wars demands rules-based cooperation, water-sharing and dispute-settlement mechanisms.
However, most of the world’s transnational basins lack any cooperative arrangement, and there is still no international water law in force. Worse, unilateralist appropriation of shared water resources is endemic where autocrats rule.





Thursday 24 April 2014

TURKEY


Turkey Ponders Role as Oil Hub

Over the past three years, Turkey has experienced some of the fastest growth in energy demand of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Unlike a number of other OECD countries in Europe, Turkey's economy has avoided the prolonged stagnation that has characterized much of the continent for the past few years. The country's energy use is still relatively low, although it is increasing at a fast pace. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy use will continue to grow at an annual growth rate of around 4.5 per cent from 2015 to 2030, approximately doubling over the next decade. 

As of January 1, 2014, the Oil & Gas Journal (OGJ) estimated Turkey's proved oil reserves at 295 million barrels, located mostly in the southeast region. Turkey's oil production peaked in 1991 at 85,000 barrels per day (bbl/d), but then it declined each year and bottomed out in 2004 at 43,000 bbl/d. Although Turkey's production of liquid fuels has increased slightly since 2004, it is far short of what the country consumes each year.

Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortaklığı (TPAO) is the main exploration and production entity in Turkey. As a state-owned firm, TPAO has preferential rights, and any foreign involvement in upstream activities is limited to joint ventures with TPAO. Overall, TPAO produced about 75 per cent of the total oil output in Turkey in 2011, according to the IEA.

The government offers several types of tax breaks to encourage exploration and production, including lower corporate tax rates, exemptions from import duties for material and equipment, and exemptions from value-added tax for exploration activities.

Territorial Disputes 

Most of Turkey's 295 million barrels of proven oil reserves are located in the Batman and Adiyaman Provinces in the southeast (which is also where most of Turkey's oil production occurs), with additional deposits found in Thrace in the northwest. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated about 438 million barrels of oil in as yet undiscovered resources in the southern onshore part of the country. While technically recoverable, it is unclear whether these resources will be economically viable to develop.

Offshore reserves may become a future source of Turkey's oil supply. There may be significant reserves under the Aegean Sea, although this has not been confirmed because of ongoing territorial disputes with Greece. The Black Sea may also hold significant oil production potential for Turkey. The Turkish national oil company, TPAO, has increased its exploration activities in the Turkish portion of the Black Sea, which could hold between 7 and 10 billion barrels of oil. The offshore area is being explored by TPAO, which has formed joint ventures with ExxonMobil and Petrobras. TPAO's short-term goal is to develop the resources situated in the Black Sea. Turkey's Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources plans to begin commercial production in the Black Sea by 2016.

Background Information:

NEW MEDITERRANEAN OIL AND GAS BONANZA


INCREASED DRILLING ACTIVITIES ANNOUNCED IN THE SOUTH EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN BASIN 

Turkey: the transit energy hub?

In addition to the Black Sea, TPAO plans to develop hydrocarbon resources in the Mediterranean. In November 2011, TPAO signed an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell for hydrocarbon exploration in the Mediterranean and the southeast area of the country. This agreement covered plans for shale gas exploration in the southeast near the city of Diyarbakir. According to Turkey's Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, Shell began exploration at the Saribugday 1 field in August 2012.
In addition to being a major market for energy supplies, Turkey's role as an energy transit hub is increasingly important. Turkey is a key part of oil and natural gas supplies movement from Russia, the Caspian region, and the Middle East to Europe. Background Information:TURKEYS ENERGY GAMBLE http://geopoliticsrst.blogspot.com/2012/07/turkey-and-russia.html

The country has been a major transit point for seaborne-traded oil and is becoming more important for pipeline-traded oil and natural gas. Growing volumes of Russian and Caspian oil are being sent by tanker via the Turkish Straits to Western markets, while a terminal on Turkey's Mediterranean coast at Ceyhan serves as an outlet for oil exports from northern Iraq and for both oil and natural gas exports from Azerbaijan. Approximately 3.0 million bbl/d flowed through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles in 2013 (approximately 2.5 million bbl/d of crude oil and 0.5 million bbl/d of petroleum products). 

Background Information: 
Turkey and Cyprus

TURKEYS SHOW OF FORCE

A terminal on Turkey's Mediterranean coast at Ceyhan facilitates oil exports from northern Iraq via a pipeline from Kirkuk and from Azerbaijan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline is Turkey's largest oil pipeline (by capacity) and serves as a transport pipeline of Iraqi oil. It is approximately 600 miles long and consists of two lines with a capacity of 1.65 million bbl/d. However, only one of the twin pipelines is operational, with a maximum operational capacity of 400,000 bbl/d, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). In late 2012, Iraq and Turkey agreed to continue crude oil imports through this pipeline for another 15 years, although frequent attacks on the pipeline regularly result in operation disruptions. Actual flows averaged just over 300,000 bbl/d in 2012.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline (BTC) is Turkey's longest pipeline (approximately 1,100 miles). Its original capacity was 1 million bbl/d, which was increased to 1.2 million bbl/d in 2009 with the use of drag-reducing agents. The pipeline transports Azeri light crude (mainly from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field) via Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for further export. Since 2008, Kazakh crude oil has also been shipped via the BTC. The crude is then shipped via tankers to European markets. The pipeline initially came into service in June 2006.

Odessa-Brody pipeline in Ukraine

To ease increasing oil traffic through the Turkish Straits and in an effort to anticipate needed increases in pipeline capacity for increasing volumes of Caspian oil, a number of Bosporus bypass options are under consideration in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Turkey itself. The BTC Pipeline, which bypasses the Turkish Straits chokepoint, is the first of many planned or proposed bypass pipelines to be constructed.

Bosporus bypass options outside of Turkey include the Odessa-Brody pipeline in Ukraine, which currently transports crude oil into Odessa (reverse mode). Others have not yet been constructed, but proposals include the Pan-European Oil Pipeline, the Bourgas, Bulgaria to Vlore, Albania, and the Bourgas to Alexandropoulos, Greece pipeline.

There were a number of bypass options proposed in Turkey over the past decade, including:

Samsun-Ceyhan Pipeline would transport oil from Turkey's Black Sea port of Samsun to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast. The project includes the construction of a 350-mile oil pipeline, a new terminal for receiving oil at Samsun, a terminal for exporting the oil, and a storage plant at Ceyhan. The oil pipeline would have a maximum initial transportation capacity of 1 million bbl/d, which can eventually be increased to 1.5 million bbl/d.
Kiyikoy-Ibrikbaba Pipeline is a 1.2 million bbl/d pipeline that would run between Kiyikoy on the Black Sea and Ibrikbaba on the Aegean Sea near Greece. This pipeline was proposed more than six years ago, but very little progress has occurred.

Canal Istanbul is a proposed 30-mile link between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. The waterway would be located on the European side of the Bosporus and completed by 2023. However, given the size of the undertaking and the associated cost, this project is the least desirable and least feasible option, and likely will not be completed.

Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Pipeline would connect oil fields in the northeast, KRG-controlled portion of Iraq to Turkey via an independent pipeline from Taq Taq to Fishkhabur. The KRG has already constructed the pipeline with a capacity of 300,000 bbl/d, but Iraq's government has threatened litigation against Turkey for buying KRG oil without official approval.

Ceyhan has become an important outlet for both Caspian oil exports as well as Iraqi oil shipments from Kirkuk

The port of Ceyhan has become an important outlet for both Caspian oil exports as well as Iraqi oil shipments from Kirkuk. Turkey is seeking to build up Ceyhan as a regional energy hub, with private investors receiving approval to build several refineries at the oil terminal, adding revenue beyond transit fees.

The Ceyhan oil terminal has four crude oil loading berths. Two outer berths can accommodate tankers up to 300,000 deadweight tons, while the two inner berths can accommodate ships up to 150,000 deadweight tons. In 2012, Ceyhan handled more than 600,000 bbl/d of Azeri exports and about 300,000 bbl/d of Iraqi crude oil exports to Europe and the United States.

Background Information: 
TURKEY IS ANXIOUS TO GAIN UPPER HAND IN THE REGIONS ENERGY BONANZA 

In addition to crude oil, Iraqi condensate exports have also started to load in Ceyhan. In September 2012, the Kurdish Regional Government trucked the first cargo of condensate from Iraq to Ceyhan, which was loaded onto a vessel on October 4. The size of the cargo was about 105,000 barrels, with additional cargoes already planned to be shipped via the same route.

The Kurdish Regional Government also stated in early 2014 that it would work with the Turkish government to open several new border crossings, increasing the potential volume of exports by truck.