Istanbul — Turkey's state-owned Botas has opened a tender for the construction of a jetty, measuring station and transit pipeline for a new FSRU LNG import terminal on the Gulf of Saros in northwest Turkey.

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According to the tender documents, the work involves the construction of a 320-meter jetty, together with an onshore gas measuring station and 17km of high pressure pipeline that will connect with the Turkey-Greece interconnector pipeline. Turkey has two onshore LNG import terminals and one other FSRU.

Bids for the tender are to be submitted by Aug. 5 with the work to be completed within 720 days of the contract being signed, suggesting the new terminal should be operational by mid-2022.

The opening of the tender follows the expiry in April of Botas' lease on the FSRU vessel the MOL Challenger that had been moored at the company's terminal at Dortyol on Turkey's East Mediterranean coast.

A Botas official told S&P Global Platts in December that Botas has ordered an FSRU vessel of its own, currently under construction in South Korea, which will be delivered during 2020 and which will be used to import LNG both at Dortyol and at the soon-to-be-constructed Saros terminal, depending on market conditions.

According to data from Platts Analytics, only 15 LNG cargoes were delivered to Dortyol since its startup in February 2018, or a total of 1.5 Bcm of regasified gas.

Connection of the new Saros FSRU terminal to the 11 Bcm/year Turkey-Greece interconnector will allow gas imported through the terminal to be transited to Greece, and once the planned 3 Bcm/year Greece-Bulgaria interconnector is completed, to Bulgaria also, completing a loop line running from Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria and back to Turkey via the existing Transbalkan pipeline.

(Updates with Turkey's other FSRU.)