ISTANBUL — When four energy executives gathered on the sidelines of Baku Energy Week on Monday to put their names to a 15-year natural gas contract, the paperwork formalized something Europe has been trying to accelerate for the better part of a decade: a supply chain that routes Caspian gas to the continent’s edge without passing through Russia.
Turkey’s state energy company BOTAS signed a natural gas sales and purchase agreement with Azerbaijan’s SOCAR, France’s TotalEnergies, and Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC International for gas to be produced from Azerbaijan’s Absheron field. Under the deal, Turkey will receive a cumulative 33 billion cubic meters of gas over 15 years, beginning in 2029, according to a statement from Turkey’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources.
The signatories were SOCAR President Rovshan Najaf, BOTAS Chairman and General Manager Abdulvahit Fidan, TotalEnergies Senior Vice President for Exploration and Production in Europe Martino Panizzi, and Mohammed Al Aryani, President of International Gas at XRG, ADNOC’s international energy trading arm. The agreement was executed on the first day of Baku Energy Week, an annual event that has become one of the primary venues for Caspian energy dealmaking.
At peak output, the Absheron project’s second development phase is expected to deliver above 4 billion cubic meters annually, with around half of that volume earmarked for Turkey under the new agreement, a SOCAR official said. The field, located on the Caspian Sea shelf about 100 kilometers southeast of Baku, holds estimated gas reserves of between 350 and 400 billion cubic meters. Production under an early phase began in July 2023 from a single deepwater well, but the commercial volumes tied to this agreement depend on a final investment decision for Phase 2 that the consortium says it expects to make later this year.
That decision has not yet been taken. Whether the partners follow through in 2026 — and on what timeline construction and first gas flow would realistically materialize — remains an open question the ministry statement did not address.
The ministry framed the deal in explicitly geopolitical terms, saying the agreement supports Turkey’s vision of becoming a central country in energy supply and would contribute to energy security across the region and in Europe. That framing tracks with the broader strategic context the deal inhabits. Russia still supplies roughly 41 percent of Turkey’s gas imports, according to Turkey’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority, and Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said last November that Ankara has no intention of stopping Russian gas purchases, describing Moscow as a reliable supplier. The new Absheron contract does not change that calculus in the near term: supplies don’t start until 2029, and the volume, averaging around 2.2 billion cubic meters a year, is a modest fraction of Turkey’s total consumption.
What the deal represents strategically is a different matter. The Southern Gas Corridor — the pipeline network running from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field through Turkey and into southern Europe via the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline — was constructed to offer the European Union an alternative to Russian supply. Turkey could use the existing TANAP-TAP infrastructure to move larger Azerbaijani volumes toward Europe, but doing so at meaningful scale requires exactly the kind of upstream investment commitment the Absheron Phase 2 agreement is now meant to underwrite. The ambition to launch a gas hub has been Turkish energy policy for years; Monday’s contract is the most concrete supply-side commitment yet toward making it real.
Since the autumn of 2024, BOTAS has been signing long-term supply agreements at a pace unusual for any state energy company. The company has locked in LNG supply deals with US-based Mercuria, ExxonMobil, and Shell, along with TotalEnergies, amounting to the equivalent of 70 billion cubic meters of gas over 20 years. Monday’s Absheron agreement adds pipeline supply to that portfolio — a deliberate diversification between seaborne LNG and fixed-route Caspian gas.
The Absheron field’s second phase involves subsea production facilities at water depths of around 500 meters, with wells projected to exceed 7,000 meters in total length — among the deepest anywhere in the Caspian Sea. TotalEnergies operates the project through JOCAP, and the consortium structure brings together the field operator, the host-country national oil company, and Gulf sovereign capital in a single equity arrangement. First production from Phase 2 is expected in late 2028 or early 2029, consistent with the contract’s 2029 delivery start. Reuters reported the signing on Monday.
The Turkish parliament passed preliminary decisions for the gas hub framework as early as 2023, establishing the legal scaffolding Ankara needed to position BOTAS as a commercial hub operator rather than simply a gas buyer. Whether that ambition translates into Turkey becoming a genuine price-setting node for European gas — rather than a transit corridor operating under long-term bilateral contracts — is a distinction the government has not yet had to resolve in practice. The Turkish Parliament’s 2023 hub framework decisions created the legal architecture, but the commercial terms signed at Baku Energy Week are what will test whether the volumes are there to make it work.
For Azerbaijan, the deal moves the Absheron project from a domestic supply asset — its first phase has served only Azerbaijan’s internal market — toward an export-oriented development that enhances SOCAR’s standing as a supplier to Europe’s most strategically sensitive energy corridor. A final investment decision this year would put first gas from Phase 2 on track for late 2028 or early 2029.
Turkey remains a country that buys from Russia and simultaneously builds the infrastructure to route non-Russian gas to Europe. That posture has served Ankara across a range of foreign policy contexts, and nothing in Monday’s agreement alters it. What the signing at Baku Energy Week does not answer is whether Turkey can remain both — Russia’s indispensable gas customer and Europe’s indispensable southern corridor — or whether the volume commitments now accumulating in its supply portfolio will eventually force a harder choice.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
