A country that once imported almost all its energy is now selling jet fuel to its neighbours, building underground gas vaults the size of small cities, drilling for oil in its own mountains, and searching for reserves in East Africa.
The transformation didn’t happen overnight — but a global energy crisis has put it on full display.
When the Strait of Hormuz became a flashpoint this spring, most countries began scrambling for fuel. Türkiye did not.
On April 22, Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu made a statement that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Türkiye, he said, faces “no jet fuel shortage” — and is in fact a net exporter.
The same week, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar confirmed there were no supply problems in fuel, natural gas, or electricity, despite the crisis triggered by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, across Europe, the picture looked very different.
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KLM cancelled 160 flights. SAS suspended thousands more.
The International Energy Agency warned of potential jet fuel shortages across the continent within weeks — a region that had met 75 percent of its aviation fuel needs from Middle Eastern sources.
Türkiye watched all of this from a very different vantage point.
A country that built its own buffer
The contrast wasn’t a matter of luck. It was the result of deliberate, years-long investment in refining capacity, supply diversification, and underground storage — pursued precisely because Ankara understood how exposed it was.
Although Türkiye imports more than 83 percent of its crude oil, it processes that crude domestically.
TUPRAS and SOCAR’s STAR Refinery lead jet fuel production, and data from Türkiye’s energy market regulatory authority EMRA shows Türkiye exported nearly 402,000 tonnes of aviation fuel in February alone, while importing just 59,000 tonnes.
TUPRAS signed a five-year supply agreement with Istanbul Airport for 1.8 million tonnes per year, while STAR Refinery committed a further 700,000 tonnes annually — securing more than 2.5 million tonnes of domestic supply for Istanbul Airport alone.
The result: while European hubs grappled with cancellations and dry pumps, Istanbul Airport recorded the highest air traffic of any hub in Europe in the week of April 30 to May 6, according to EUROCONTROL data.
Foreign carriers began routing through Turkish airports specifically to refuel — a technical stop born of necessity that reflects a new strategic reality.
The gas story is just as striking — even if less visible.
Beneath the dry plains of central Anatolia, near Sultanhani in Aksaray province, lies the Tuz Golu Underground Gas Storage Facility — a network of enormous artificial caverns drilled into the salt formations below one of the world’s largest salt lakes.
On the European shore of the Marmara, Silivri serves as Türkiye’s second-largest storage hub, commissioned in 2007 with a capacity now being expanded to 4.6 billion cubic metres.
Together, these two facilities form the backbone of Türkiye’s gas security.
Energy and Natural Resources Minister Bayraktar announced that the two sites together had reached a combined capacity of 6.3 billion cubic metres, with both entering the current period at 100 percent capacity.
But the expansion plans go much further.
Bayraktar has said the target is to take Tuz Golu to 5.4 billion cubic metres and Silivri to 6 billion — bringing total national storage to around 12 billion cubic metres by 2028, equivalent to roughly 20 percent of Türkiye’s annual consumption.
And crucially: once these expansions are complete, Türkiye will be able to supply all residential gas needs on its coldest winter day from storage and domestic Black Sea production alone — without a single cubic metre of imported gas.
Hydropower from the mountains of the southeast
Beyond gas storage, Türkiye has spent two decades harnessing its rivers.
The Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River in southeastern Türkiye — among the largest dams in the world by fill volume and the country’s fourth-largest hydroelectric facility — has produced 14.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity since coming online in 2020, contributing tens of billions of lira to the national economy.
With 1,200 megawatts of installed capacity, the dam produces enough electricity annually to power a city the size of Ankara.
The Ilisu project sits alongside the older giants of the Euphrates — Ataturk, Karakaya, and Keban — within a hydroelectric network that forms the clean-energy backbone of the country’s southeast, a region that for decades saw its underground wealth remain untapped because of security conditions that have now fundamentally changed.
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Fossil fuels and water are only part of the story. Türkiye is in the midst of one of the most significant renewable energy build-outs in its history.
As of March 2026, Türkiye’s total installed electricity capacity reached 125,000 megawatts, with renewable energy sources accounting for 62.4 percent of the total.
Solar alone had reached 26,478 megawatts — over 21 percent of total installed capacity — while wind accounted for 15,039 megawatts.
