(The Turkish Post) – Türkiye sent its first floating gas production platform, the Osman Gazi, from the port of Filyos to the Sakarya gas field on Oct. 17, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the unit would double the country’s Black Sea gas output to 20 million cubic meters a day.
Erdoğan said the increase would allow one in three Turkish households to use domestically produced gas from 2027. Türkiye imports most of the natural gas it consumes, mainly from Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran by pipeline and as liquefied natural gas.
Erdoğan sends Osman Gazi to the Black Sea
Erdoğan addressed the departure ceremony at Filyos, in the northern province of Zonguldak, by video message. “Today, we are opening a brand-new page in our energy history,” he said.
He described the Osman Gazi as “the first factory of the Blue Homeland,” the term Turkish officials use for the country’s maritime jurisdiction areas. The platform will process gas from the Sakarya field’s wells and send it to Filyos through subsea pipelines.
Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar, who attended the ceremony at the port, set a target for the end of the year. “Our goal is to ignite the flame of the Sakarya Gas Field in Osman Gazi’s flare tower before the end of this year,” he said.
Black Sea gas output to double
The Sakarya field currently produces about 9.5 million cubic meters of gas a day, according to the Energy Ministry. With the Osman Gazi in service, daily output is expected to reach 20 million cubic meters, with production from the platform planned to start in early 2027.
Bayraktar has said the platform will raise the number of households supplied with domestic gas from 4 million to 8 million. The government’s Directorate of Communications put the platform’s contribution to the economy at $3.5 billion a year.
Energy prices have risen sharply this year, with the Iran war keeping oil above $100 a barrel for much of October.
A 298-meter processing plant at sea
The Osman Gazi is 298.5 meters long and 56 meters wide, and it will carry a crew of 140 working around the clock. Its deck holds 21 separate processing units, and it is designed to operate in the field for 20 years.
A 96-meter flare tower weighing 260 tons was installed on the platform at Filyos in August. About 7,000 people took part in preparing the unit, according to the ministry.
Erdoğan announced the purchase of the floating production unit in July 2024. The vessel left Istanbul in May 2025 and spent more than a year being refitted at Filyos for work in the Sakarya field. Its departure had earlier been planned for Aug. 30 and then for the end of September.
Sakarya gas field from discovery to second phase
The drillship Fatih discovered the Sakarya gas field in August 2020 with an initial estimate of 320 billion cubic meters. Later discoveries have raised the field’s estimated reserves to about 785 billion cubic meters, the latest being the Göktepe-3 well, announced in May 2025 with 75 billion cubic meters.
The first gas from the field reached shore at Filyos in April 2023. The first phase relied on wells connected to an onshore processing plant at Filyos. The Osman Gazi completes the second phase, which processes gas at sea before sending it to the coast. A third phase, with a second floating platform, is planned to raise output to about 40 million cubic meters a day.
Türkiye’s state energy fleet includes drillships and seismic research vessels working in the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. The seismic vessel Oruç Reis reached Kyrenia earlier this month to map a planned gas pipeline route to Turkish Cyprus.
The Osman Gazi will be stationed about 170 kilometers off the coast, where the ministry plans to light its first flame before the end of 2026.
