Both problems will save lives, that is obvious. On the one hand lots of academicians, intelligence officers, security experts work men hours to avoid a possible terror attack that will kill many. On the other hand, not very brainy but creative ad-campaigns and regulations will save lots of lives.

When the discussion comes to Turkey, traffic accidents is a big subject. The people name it “Traffic terror”. So many people dies in everyday accidents. You can just turn on a Turkish TV news and see common scenes of high speed crashes and junked cars. But the importance of this discussion for Turkey, may not have the effect in a European or American public discussion.

The same can be said for peak oil. Peak oil is a hot subject, but hardly any Turkish energy discussion involves it. It is more about market, sales, new investments, doomed scenarios regarding the energy dependency to regional countries. But in America, peak oil is much more debated than Turkey.

There may be several reasons for that including the long history of oil, developments and intellectual accumulation over the years with experience in the US. But one of the most important factors is the increase in oil prices increases the outrage and panic with respect to the life style of today.

As an example, Turkish roads have much smaller, European/Japanese style, an increasingly diesel powered engine cars. SUVs? What are they?

According to February statistics by Turkstat, 14.5% of the whole registered cars is Renault, 8.5% is Toyota, 8.3% Volkswagen and then comes and American brand Ford with 8.1%.

And how about the prices? The prices are nearly three times of the US prices. And the GDP of Turkey is far lower than US. In the previous weeks, we have shown that the Turkish Diesel is around 256 dollars (US) a barrel and this price is increasing due to strengthening Turkish lira against US dollars.

Source: Petder.org.tr

The results of this can be easily seen in the graphs. In Turkey the consumption of what is petroleum products for transportation sees a plateu. But this may be misleading because most of the cars in Turkey also uses LPG. And this has not been mentioned in this graph. Most of the cars inserted with LPG modules are generally gasoline/benzine using cars.

So there is a need to investigate the trend in Turkish oil consumption and world’s oil consumption and probably this will be more helpful. From the graph one can easily spot the  plateu in Turkish oil consumption.

Source: BP Statistical Review 2006 (1.00 corresponds to 688,000 b/d for Turkey and 82.5 million b/d for World)

What we see from the graph is a sudden increase in Turkish oil consumption between 1991-1993 and 1995-1996 but afterwards the growth in oil consumption stagnates. But the world consumption increases with near linearity. One should also note that except for the crises years Turkey has grown roughly twice when compared with the world.

Source: BP Statistical Review 2006 (1.00 corresponds to 688,000 b/d for Turkey and 20.7 million b/d for US)

Also when compared with the US, Turkish hunger for oil has grown less than that of US between 1996-2005. Even it can be concluded that Turkey has seen a more dramatic decrease in 2005 than US.

Of course the data’s reliability should be checked. There is a major factor that may be affecting the reliability of the domestic oil consumption in Turkey and that is oil smuggling from Iran. The contrast between Iran’s cheap, subsidiesed oil and Turkey’s expensive and highly taxed oil turns the smuggling into an highly profitable financial activity.  Neverthless Turkish authorities have launched new measures to control this activities through regulatory authority.

So, it will not be wrong to say that, Turkey’s high growth has not increased the oil consumption. There are different factors including taxes, prices and consumer expectancy for long term high prices for mobility sector in overall.

Is this an answer to why peak oil is not much debated in Turkey? Is this because, Turks are already practising peak oil measures? So what are the alternatives?

The answers to this questions is not easy. On important thing is the decrease in oil consumption growth does not necessarily diminished the energy imports. Turkey’s pitfall and preference in energy discussions lie here. Turkey’s problem is natural gas not oil. And most of the active discussion and strategy is based on natural gas which will not likely to peak soon.

Source: BP Statistical Review 2006 (1.00 corresponds to 27.4 bcm for Turkey and 2750 bcm for World)

Due to long term take-or-pay aggrements, the relatively modest consumption for natural gas between 1990-1996 takes off the 27.4 bcm by 2005. And this number is approximately 30 bcm by the end of 2006.

The breakdown of this consumption reveals a dominant usage for power generation. While in the world we see a modest increase in gas usage a near stagnation and a small decrease in US consumption, we see a surge in demand in Turkey.

Source: Botas.gov.tr

Turkey may not be oil addicted, but Turkey is well on the way to be a gas-addicted country. And due to market liberalisation, it is feared that this addiction to continue. The most feared is not the addiction by itself but addiction to a single largest supplier: Russia.

Therefore, it is not a big suprise to see anyone discussing about peak oil in Turkey, but rather talking about using domestic resources to produce electricity and reduce the dependency to Russian gas. Turks do not have big inefficient cars. And there are lots of incentives to use less oil, mainly because of high taxes on cars and oil. But the normative energy discussion in Turkey is the future about gas and electricity. Like safety belts and terrorism, the price increase in oil may have threaten American’s belief in abundance of oil, but for Turks the belief in low oil prices has ended up in 1996.

metingezen@gmail.com

This commentary is from USAK’s Energy Review Newsletter
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