Asian bids 'closer' to winning Turkey's 2nd nuclear plant project

Project image from Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant of Turkey

Hurriyet Daily News

Asian countries are closer to winning a bid to build Turkey's second nuclear power plant near the Black Sea city of Sinop, the Turkish energy minister said on Tuesday, in a signal that Canada was no longer in the running.

"Even though we have not reached a final agreement right now, I can say that Far Eastern countries are closer" to winning the tender on the building of a second reactor, Taner Yildiz was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency. Ankara is officially in negotiations with China, Japan, South Korea and Canada to build the second nuclear reactor. The government plans to build three nuclear power plants within five years in hopes of preventing a possible energy shortage and reducing dependence on foreign energy supplies.

Turkey struck a deal with Russia in 2010 to build the country's first power plant at Akkuyu in the southern Mersin province.

Yildiz said Tuesday that there was no agreement yet on the location of a third reactor but added that the town of Igneada in the Black Sea region near the Bulgarian border was one of the options.

Source: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/asian-bids-closer-to-winning-turkey-nuclear-plant-project.aspx?pageID=238&nID=37612&NewsCatID=348

The New Mediterranean Oil and Gas Bonanza Part II: Rising energy tensions in the Aegean—Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria

F. William Engdahl      Global Research

The discovery in late 2010 of the huge natural gas bonanza off Israel’s Mediterranean shores triggered other neighboring countries to look more closely at their own waters. The results revealed that the entire eastern Mediterranean is swimming in huge untapped oil and gas reserves. That discovery is having enormous political, geopolitical as well as economic consequences. It well may have potential military consequences too.

Preliminary exploration has confirmed similarly impressive reserves of gas and oil in the waters off Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and potentially, Syria.

Greek ‘energy Sirtaki’ 

Not surprisingly, amid its disastrous financial crisis the Greek government began serious exploration for oil and gas. Since then the country has been in a curious kind of a dance with the IMF and EU governments, a kind of “energy Sirtaki” over who will control and ultimately benefit from the huge resource discoveries there. 

In December 2010, as it seemed the Greek crisis might still be resolved without the by-now huge bailouts or privatizations, Greece’s Energy Ministry formed a special group of experts to research the prospects for oil and gas in Greek waters. Greece’s Energean Oil & Gas began increased investment into drilling in the offshore waters after a successful smaller oil discovery in 2009. Major geological surveys were made. Preliminary estimates now are that total offshore oil in Greek waters exceeds 22 billion barrels in the Ionian Sea off western Greece and some 4 billion barrels in the northern Aegean Sea. [1] 

Iraq, Kurds, Turks and oil: A tortuous triangle

The Economist

The governments of Turkey, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan play a dangerous game

SNAKING their way from Kirkuk, a city 240 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, through Kurdistan and across Turkey’s eastern region of Anatolia to the Mediterranean are pipes that once carried 1.6m barrels a day (b/d) of Iraqi oil to the global market and yielded fat transit fees to Turkey along the way. The infrastructure underpinned the two countries’ mutual dependence. But nowadays the balance of power has shifted. A third party, the Iraqi Kurds, has changed it. It is unclear who will emerge on top. But Iraq’s central government in Baghdad is on the defensive.

Wars, saboteurs and, since the 1990s, economic sanctions have left the Iraqi sections of the pipeline system in a mess. Barely a fraction of its capacity is used. One of the two parallel lines stands empty and the source that once fed them, the giant Kirkuk oilfield, is dilapidated. The oil ministry in Baghdad has vague ideas about revamping the pipeline, perhaps to carry crude extracted near Basra, in the far south, though this would need an expensive new pipeline to link both ends of the country.

But Turkey is hatching a different plan for its section of the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan pipeline. Its souring relations with the government in Baghdad have spurred it to cultivate new ties with the Iraqi Kurds’ regional government in Erbil, which oversees the oil and gas that Turkey’s growing economy craves. A wide-ranging energy deal is in the works that will see state-backed Turkish firms and Western oil majors plough money into Kurdish infrastructure and oilfields, connecting them to Turkey and the world beyond. The deal could eventually allow for up to 2m b/d of Kurdish oil exports to go through Turkey.

Last year, trade between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan amounted to $8 billion. Turkish money has paid for pristine airports in Erbil and Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurdish city further north, and for other large projects. Not long ago, Turkish politicians, wary of their own large and restless Kurdish minority still fighting for autonomy (or more) in eastern Turkey, barely acknowledged Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

Turkey’s tech businesses: Boom on the Bosporus

The Economist

Lots of young people, eager to shop and play online: no wonder Turkey’s internet industry is crowded

MUSLIM farmers do not keep pigs. This is as true of those who play at virtual agriculture as of those who fill physical food-troughs. So there are no pigs in the Arabic version of “Happy Farm”, published by Peak Games, a young firm based in Istanbul. For the same reason “Happy Farm” has no vineyards, and female farmhands wear the hijab. Local tastes matter.

Peak Games has found rich soil. It already employs 200 people and has developers in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as Istanbul and Ankara. More than 35m people play its games at least once a month, many of them on Facebook. Half of the players are in Turkey; the rest are in the Middle East and north Africa. Rina Onur, one of its founders, says that she and her colleagues saw a gap in the online-games market that companies catering to Western tastes could not fill. So Peak Games offers people in Turkey and nearby countries games with a regional twist, like “Happy Farm”, as well as online versions of traditional amusements. Okey, a Turkish game played with tiles, is most popular.

Turkey is bursting with internet companies, many of them selling things to the young. It is not hard to see why. The country is big, youthful and embracing the internet eagerly. Half of its 75m people are under 30. Around 44% of Turks use the internet, up from just 14% in 2006 and 3% in 2000. They comprise Facebook’s seventh-largest national audience. Turks are also happy to use credit cards, which are handy for buying things online: the country has three of them for every five people, says GP Bullhound, an investment bank, more than the European average. And the market still has a lot of room to grow. Penetration rates are well below those in western Europe (see chart).

Turkey weighs pivotal oil deal with Iraqi Kurdistan

Ben Ven Heuvelen     The Washington Post

ANKARA, Turkey — American diplomats are struggling to prevent a seismic shift in Turkey’s policy toward Iraq, a change that U.S. officials fear could split the foundations of that fractious state.

The most volatile fault line in Iraq divides the semiautonomous Kurdistan region in the north from the Arab-majority central government in Baghdad. As the two sides fight for power over territory and oil rights, Turkey is increasingly siding with the Kurds.

Kurdish and Turkish leaders have had a budding courtship for five years. But now Turkey is negotiating a massive deal in which a new Turkish company, backed by the government, is proposing to drill for oil and gas in Iraq’s Kurdish region and build pipelines to transport those resources to international markets. The negotiations were confirmed by four senior Turkish officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities.

“Turkey hasn’t needed to ask what we think of this, because we tell them at every turn,” said a senior U.S. official involved in Middle East policymaking, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with the media. The official said that any bilateral energy deals with the Kurdistan region would “threaten the unity of Iraq and push [Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki closer to Iran.”

Greece Is Not Poor - It Actually Has Massive Uptapped Reserves Of Gold, Oil And Natural Gas

By Michael

It turns out that the poster child for the European debt crisis is not actually poor at all.  In fact, the truth is that the nation of Greece is sitting on absolutely massive untapped reserves of gold, oil and natural gas.  If the Greeks were to fully exploit the natural resources that are literally right under their feet, they would no longer have any debt problems.  Fortunately, this recent economic crisis has spurred them to action and it is now being projected that Greece will be the number one gold producer in Europe by 2016. 

In addition, Greece is now opening up exploration of their massive oil and natural gas deposits.  Reportedly, Greece is sitting on hundreds of millions of barrels of oil and gigantic natural gas deposits that are worth trillions of dollars.  It is truly sad that Greece should be one of the wealthiest nations in all of Europe but instead the country is going through the worst economic depression that it has experienced in modern history.  It is kind of like a homeless man that sleeps on the streets every night without realizing that a relative has left him an inheritance worth millions of dollars.  Greece is not poor at all, and hopefully the people of Greece can learn the truth about all of this wealth and chart a course out of this current mess.

I have written extensively about the nightmarish economic conditions that Greece is experiencing right now.  Just check out this article, this article and this article.  Since the depression began in Greece, the Greek economy has contracted by more than 20 percent.  In April 2010, the unemployment rate in Greece was only 11.8 percent.  Since then it has skyrocketed to 25.1 percent.

China ‘has advantage’ in bid for Turkey's 2nd nuclear plant

 

 Hurriyet Daily News

A withdraw from Treasury guarantee demand and self-financing option makes China advantageous in its race with Japan, South Korea and Canada for Turkey’s second planned nuclear facility, Turkish Energy Minister Yıldız says. The winner is expected to be announced before the end of the year

As the Turkish government nears the deadline it set for itself to announce the winning company of a bid for a second nuclear plant in the Black Sea region, Energy Minister Taner Yıldız has said China possesses an advantage.

China brings it own financing to the project and does not demand a Treasury guarantee, which are important advantages, Yıldız said at the Caspian Forum 2012 in Istanbul  Reuters reported.

However, China is also demanding a share in the discussed facility, Yıldız said.

Canada, South Korea and Japan are also bidding for the Sinop nuclear facility plans and the ministry had earlier announced the winner would be made public by the end of this year.

Why The Middle East Has A Big Oil Problem: 'Squaring Obama's Xi Circle'

Matthew Hulbert     Forbes

‘Stick or twist’ sums up the changes of political power in America and China in November 2012. President Obama won another four year term in Washington, whileXi Jinping assumed stewardship of China. This intricate ‘Chimerican’ relationship is fundamental to the global outlook anywhere you care to look, and nowhere more so than the Middle East. External security provision is still provided by the West, while economic pull has shifted to the East. Sounds a simple division of labour, but the ‘roles’ actually become very mixed up once you take a closer look. Squaring this awkward ‘Chimerican’ circle is going to be a tough ask for Gulf States to get right, but it’s absolutely critical to their geo-economic and geopolitical future to do so over the next four years.

Team America

From the U.S. perspective, the old mantra has always been that a threat to Middle East oil supplies correlated to a direct threat to American national security. This was explicitly spelt out in the 1980 Carter Doctrine that’s been the cornerstone of Washington’s role in the Gulf ever since. But times are now rapidly changing, and doing so, precisely because the U.S. has seen enormous hydrocarbon production growth on home soil. The initial energy ‘revolution’ was in natural gas, making America the world’s largest single (651bcm) producer, and’s now shifting towards liquids. U.S. oil production growth has been 500,000b/d over the past four years, with total liquids output expected to hit 11.4mb/d next year and onto 13-15mb/d towards 2020. That will make America the largest single liquids player in the world, surpassing even Saudi production numbers, with the obvious upshot that Washington no longer sees MENA oil as the valued prize it once was. Whether you’re like the International Energy Agency and fully signed up to the ‘U.S. energy independence’ narrative or not doesn’t really matter: The Obama Administration believes it has sufficient ‘hydrocarbon’ space to pick and choose what it does or doesn’t decide to do to underwrite global energy supplies in future. That’s exactly what it’s going to do over the next four years.

Is the new Cyprus-Greece-Israel energy triangle casting a net for Turkey?

George STAVRIS       Hürriyet Daily News

Long-running speculation over massive natural gas reserves in the tumultuous Southeastern Mediterranean and Cyprus’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) became a reality in December 2011 when official research and scope reports were released.

Today, the Republic of Cyprus finds itself grappling with this mixed blessing. These rich findings can provide long-term benefits for the country but Cyprus is more like a novice treading a very slippery floor in the major leagues of global diplomacy.

A new but familiar player, the state of Israel, has made a thunderous entry into the traditionally loud trio of Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, causing significant ruptures to the balance of the neighborhood. The event that sparked Israel’s newfound interest in Cyprus was the definitive signs of massive natural gas reserves in Cyprus’ Plot No. 12 (fittingly codenamed “Aphrodite”), right next to Israel’s own EEZ and massive reserves in its “Leviathan” plot.

It became apparent right from the start that Israel naturally considered every issue as highly imbued with its own national interest. Thus the decision to collaborate in treating the extracted natural gas and then transporting it to Europe (from both countries’ plots) came as a complete formula: pipelines would be part of a joint network, a vast specialized storage terminal, valued at 10 billion euros and funded almost completely by Israel. They would be built at the Vassilikos port near Limassol and the majority of the approximately 10,000 highly skilled personnel needed would be Israelis. Naturally, additional issues have come up in the logical process of things. The project will take about six or seven years to complete and inevitably the thousands of Israeli personnel engaged in it will need to have their families near them, so the total number of Israelis in Cyprus would become even greater, at least 15,000. These Israeli citizens will need to be housed in safe and secure conditions near the working site. Any analyst can easily run the math on the size and nature of this security force.

Russia-Iraq arms deal $4.2 billion, incl anti-aircraft missiles & radar for Kurdistan to address Turkish air ops targeting PKK

Nidal al-Laythi  Al Monitor

Russia’s Council of Ministers issued a press release on the meeting held by Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is currently on a visit to Russia.

The press release said that Iraq has signed arms deals worth over $4.2 billion with Russia during the second half of 2012. The deal was described by observers as the biggest move to help the Russian arms industry avoid recession after it lost its markets in Libya and Syria.

It marks the biggest single weapons transaction Moscow has conducted for 30 years, except for deals with Algeria and Venezuela.

MP Hakim al-Zamili, a member of the security and defense committee in the Iraqi parliament, told Azzaman that the Russian arms deal, signed by the Iraqi prime minister during his visit to Moscow, includes the purchase of anti-aircraft missiles and radar systems that will be installed in the Kurdistan region to address violations by Turkish aircraft of Iraqi airspace as part of their operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is carrying out military operations against the Turkish army from and through Iraqi territory.