Q&A: Turkey’s Finance Minister on the Economy, Lira and Energy

Turkey’s Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak provided written answers to questions from Bloomberg about the economic outlook, exchange and interest rates, energy and foreign policy. Following is a transcript translated from Turkish.

A: As you know, we have started a new period in offshore hydrocarbon exploration with the National Energy and Mining Policy unveiled in 2017, when I was the minister of energy and natural resources. We have aimed to reach capacity to operate in this field completely through our own means. In line with this strategy, we have acquired three state-of-the-art drilling ships in addition to our Oruc Reis and Barbaros Hayrettin seismic ships. We have made a significant improvement in Turkish Petroleum in terms of human resources, as well as hardware. We have made a very important gas discovery in the ninth round of drilling in the new period we have started with our Fatih and Yavuz drilling ships. In the past, six wells were drilled in the Black Sea in cooperation with foreign firms but nothing was found. Tuna-1 well is a location where we decided to drill after three-dimensional seismic researches that we conducted during this new significant period that started in 2017.