Gas, oil shipments through Turkey remain uninterrupted after failed coup

Oil tankers are sailing without interruption in Turkey’s waters and are loading and unloading shipments normally at the nation’s ports after an attempted military coup has been crushed by forces loyal to President RecepTayyip Erdogan.

No energy cargoes have been halted since large tankers were barred for security reasons from sailing in the Bosphorus waterway near Istanbul for several hours on July 16, a port agent said.

“The coup has failed,” said Robin Mills, chief executive officer of Dubai-based consultant Qamar Energy. “There is no direct impact on supplies. It does elevate geopolitical concern a little bit.”

Turkey, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, is a crucial channel of crude transport from Russia and Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. Millions of barrels of oil travel through the nation’s waterways and pipelines daily.

The Turkish Straits, including the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, are one of the world’s major choke points for seaborne crude transit, with about 2.9 million barrels of oil passing through daily in 2013, the latest year of available data from the US Energy Information Administration. Turkish maritime authorities stopped tankers larger than 200 m (656 ft) from sailing in the Bosphorus on Saturday, July 16 from sunrise until about 10:30 AM local time, the port agent said. Tanker traffic resumed after that, he said.

Turkey is also home to pipelines that transport crude and condensate from nations including Iraq and Azerbaijan to the port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean Sea in southern Turkey. BP Plc, operator of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan via Georgia, confirmed that oil was flowing uninterrupted. According to a report, BP’s Turkish facilities are open and operating normally, with no disruptions to the flow of oil through the BTC pipeline.