Botas, Turkey's state-owned crude oil and natural gas pipelines and trading company, has opened a tender for the construction of a jetty, measuring station and transit pipeline for a new Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRU) LNG import terminal on the Gulf of Saros in northwest Turkey.

As reported in 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.

By 5 August bids for the tender are to be submitted 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.

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.