Azerbaijan this week stepped up natural gas deliveries to Turkey amid technical problems that halted imports from Iran, one of the main gas suppliers to the Turkish market.

“Amid the technical problems observed in recent days in connection with the import of natural gas from Iran to Turkey, the Turkish side has requested the Azerbaijani Gas Sales Company (AGSC) to import additional volumes of gas to compensate for the temporary shortage,” Ibrahim Ahmedov, official representative of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), told RIA Novosti.

“The request received from Turkey has been taken into account by the company. It was decided to increase the volume of gas exported from Azerbaijan to Turkey, within the existing possibilities and in accordance with the demand,” he added.

Last week, Iran halted gas flows to Turkey for up to ten days due to technical problems at a booster station on Turkish territory, a claim Ankara denies. The problems caused severe power outages in Turkey, causing manufacturing companies to halt production. Iran, which supplied 16% of Turkey’s total natural gas imports from January to October 2021, announced the resumption of deliveries on January 21.

However, Turkish authorities said the restored supplies were below the contracted amount, which is 28 million cubic meters (more than 988 million cubic feet) of gas per day. Ankara claimed that the reason for the temporary Iranian gas supply cut was actually the shortage of blue energy in Iran’s domestic market, but not technical issues. During a recent visit by a Turkish delegation to Tehran, it was revealed that Iran was trying to meet the growing demand for domestic use, which caused a sudden halt in exports to Turkey.

Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Fatih Dönmez said Iran did not meet certain technical conditions related to the establishment of the natural gas contract with Turkey. Ankara is demanding the case be resolved in the coming days and has warned it could seek international arbitration if necessary.

Turkey is heavily dependent on natural gas imports from Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan, with the latter increasing its role in the Turkish market. Turkey buys almost all of the 40-50 bcm of its annual gas consumption from foreign markets. In 2019, global imports of natural gas were 48.6 billion m3. According to January 2020 data compiled by EMRA, Ankara pays $12-13 billion annually for gas imports.

Azerbaijani gas has been transported to Turkey through the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline since 2007. Turkey received 6.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from the South Caucasus country every year until the end of the contract in April 2021. In October 2021, Baku and Ankara shook hands to extend the contract for the delivery of 11 billion m3 of Azerbaijani gas to Turkey until the end of 2024.

Despite the long-term operation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum line, the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline (TANAP), an integral part of the Southern Gas Corridor mega-project, has expanded energy cooperation between Turkey and Azerbaijan.

TANAP is the largest and most expensive part of the three-segment Southern Gas Corridor, which is 1,878 kilometers long. It went live with the start of commercial supplies in June 2018. Six billion cubic meters out of SGC’s global transport volume of 16 billion cubic meters is planned for Turkey via TANAP. The remaining 10 billion cubic meters are allocated to Europe. The Shah Deniz offshore gas field under the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea is the one and only source of gas supply for the SGC mega-pipeline. As of September 1, 2021, TANAP has pumped 6.7 billion m3 of natural gas from Azerbaijan to Turkey.