On April 30, 2018, the deep-water pipelay for the first line of the TurkStream offshore gas pipeline has been completed off Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

The average rate of the deep-water pipelay carried out by the pipelaying vessel Pioneering Spirit was 4.3 kilometers per day. The maximum pipelaying rate of 5.6 kilometers per day was reached two times in February 2018.

In accordance with the schedule, the project is being simultaneously implemented onshore in Russia and Turkey and in the Black Sea. The receiving terminal is being constructed near the settlement of Kiyikoy, Turkey. Upon the completion of the landfall sections, work on the first line will be completed. Following the schedule, Pioneering Spirit will continue the deep-water pipelay of line two in the third quarter of 2018.

 “The Implementation of the TurkStream project carries on successfully. We have reached an important milestone, the completion of line one. Progress is moving at a high rate. Since May 7, 2017, when we started the pipelaying process, a total of 1,161 kilometers of pipe has been laid, which is 62 percent of the overall gas pipeline length. Needless to say, TurkStream will play a significant role in strengthening the energy security for Turkey and Europe,” said the chairman of Gazprom’s management committee Alexey Miller.

TurkStream is a project for building a gas pipeline stretching across the Black Sea from Russia to Turkey and further to Turkey’s border with its neighboring countries. The first line of the gas pipeline is intended for the Turkish consumers, while the second line is designated for the Southern and South-Eastern Europe. Each line will have the throughput capacity of 15.75 billion cubic meters of gas per year. South Stream Transport B.V., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gazprom, is responsible for the construction of the gas pipeline’s offshore section that started on May 7, 2017.

Turkey is Gazprom’s second largest export market. Currently, Russian gas is delivered to Turkey via the Blue Stream gas pipeline and the Transbalkan Corridor. In 2017, Gazprom supplied a record of 29 billion cubic meters of gas to the Turkish market. The figure is 4.3 billion cubic meters (bcm), or 17.3 percent, more than the number registered in 2016 and 1.7 bcm, or 6.2 percent, more than the figure for 2014, when the previous maximum result of 27.3 billion cubic meters was achieved.