Alexey Belogoryev, Research and Development Director of the Institute for Energy and Finance, commented to Kommersant FM, why Gazprom has lost interest in the idea of participating in the development of the Turkish gas hub.
The idea of creating a Turkish hub back in 2022 looked doubtful, Alexey Belogoryev believes:
"Gazprom did not have any project. There were discussions and an analysis of the possibility of developing a Turkish gas hub. A gas hub usually refers to the point where trade transactions take place, and pricing is carried out at a more advanced stage. As for pricing, it was a completely impossible dream.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's energy policy is very conservative, and the domestic market is essentially closed to non-residents. The only remaining supplies are to Greece, which has virtually no spare capacity, and there have been no plans to expand these capacities as part of the gas hub development. You can put at least ten pipelines from Russia to Turkey, but the bottleneck is located on the border of Turkey and the EU.
And the operator of the gas transmission system of this EU country should build infrastructure on the territory of the EU, in Greece or Bulgaria.
There are plans to increase Azerbaijani gas supplies to Europe, but they have nothing to do with the Turkish gas hub. Therefore, the whole idea was initially very strange, and it was perceived both in Gazprom and at the expert level. Maybe something will work in the 2030s, and Turkey's role in the European gas market will increase, but this also requires a lot of effort, because Turkey's main problem is its peripheral location relative to Europe."
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