Turkey well placed to serve as oil and gas hub: US

Turkey is well placed and an increasingly significant hub for oil and natural gas transit from the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia to Europe and the Atlantic, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has said. 

In its country analysis published in early July, the U.S. administration emphasized Turkey has been a major transit point for oil, and is becoming more important as a transit point for natural gas. 

On naval oil transit, Turkey's straits, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, are the gateways for Russian and Caspian crude oil to international markets. 

The Turkish straits are the sixth biggest chokepoint in the world, with 2.9 million barrels a day of crude transiting through in 2013, according to the EIA's World Oil Transit Chokepoints report published in November 2014. 

This constituted 5.1 percent of the 56.5 million barrels a day of maritime oil trade, and 3.2 percent of the 90.1 million barrels a day of world crude oil supply in 2013.

Oil pipelines

Turkey has two oil pipelines, one coming from Iraq to Turkey's southeast and the other coming from Azerbaijan, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. 

The Iraqi pipeline has two branches. The 620-mile (990-kilometer) pipeline coming from the oil-rich Kirkuk province in Iraq has a capacity to carry 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. However, it is seldom used due to the presence of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in Iraq.

The other branch is coming from the Taq Taq field near Arbil in northern Iraq. The 250-mile (400-kilometer) pipeline has a daily capacity of 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day. 

Although there have been recent disputes about oil transit and budget shares between the Kurdistan...