Europe

Europe

Turkish vessel starts oil exploration in Mediterranean: report

27 September 2011 04:34 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A Turkish vessel began oil exploration in the Mediterranean Monday afternoon, APA reports quoting XInhua.

The vessel, Piri Reis, began seismic studies as of 4:30 p.m. ( 1300 GMT) Monday in the east Mediterranean, Anatolia quoted Huseyin Avni Benli, director of Dokuz Eylul University’s Naval Sciences & Technology Institute, as saying.

The research works are proceeding normally, Benli said, adding that Turkish war planes and frigates were closely escorting Piri Reis.

Earlier this week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu signed an agreement in New York on the delineation of the continental shelf between the two sides in east Mediterranean following the Greek Cypriots’ move to start offshore drilling for natural gas and oil in waters southeast of the island of Cyprus.

Piri Reis, built in the Julius Diedrich shipyard in Germany in 1978, is able to carry out two-dimension seismic surveys for 20 days.

Named after famous Ottoman captain, geographer and cartographer Piri Reis, the vessel weighed anchor from the Urla Port in Turkey’ s western province of Izmir on Friday for east Mediterranean to explore oil and natural gas.

In 2010, the Cypriot administration signed with Israel an accord demarcating their maritime borders to facilitate a search for mineral deposits in east Mediterranean.

The Greek Cypriot administration has recently begun oil and natural gas exploration and drilling with U.S.-based Noble Energy in an economic zone adjacent to the Israeli waters.

However, Turkey claimed the delimitation of the economic zone is disputable.

Also on Monday, Anatolia report said Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou telephoned his Turkish counterpart Erdogan and discussed the Cyprus issue and oil exploration projects in east Mediterranean. They agreed to hold a high-level cooperation council meeting in the coming months, probably in late October or mid-November.

Sources cited Erdogan as telling his Greek counterpart that unilateral steps regarding offshore drilling for oil and gas in the region would harm the ongoing negotiation process, stressing that the issue should be left after a comprehensive settlement was reached to reunify the Cyprus island, according to the Anatolia report.