Russia is ready to increase its gas supplies to Turkey by 3 billion cubic meters/year, a spokeswoman for Russia's energy ministry told Platts late Tuesday.
"In principle, Russia is ready to increase supplies to Turkey by 3 Bcm/year, we are waiting for an official request from the Turkish side," she said.
Should Ankara file such a request, the two parties will start discussing the routes through which the additional volumes are to go, she added.
Earlier this week, Turkey's energy minister Taner Yildiz said the country's gas imports are enough to meet the domestic demand this winter.
In early December, Russian media reported Russia's energy ministry Alexander Novak as saying that Moscow and Ankara had discussed increasing Russian natural gas supplies to Turkey by 3 Bcm/year via the Blue Stream pipeline and, possibly, via the Transbalkan route.
"We have agreed that [state-owned gas producer] Gazprom is to look into the technical possibility of expanding the Blue Stream capacity and there is another option of supply via the Western route," the minister was reported to say.
Currently, Russia supplies around 27 Bcm/year of gas to Turkey via the Blue Stream pipeline and the so-called Western, or Transbalkan, route, a spokeswoman for Gazprom Export said Tuesday.
"It is technically possible to increase the volumes supplied to Turkey by 3 Bcm/year so that they reached the actual contracted figures [of 30 Bcm/year]," she said, declining further comment.
In 2011, Russia's state-owned Gazprom supplied 25.99 Bcm of natural gas to Turkey, up from 18.01 Bcm in 2010, according to company data.
Turkey's gas imports from Russia are via three contracts -- a 25-year contract for 6 Bcm/year via the Transbalkan pipeline, which ended in December last year but was extended for a further year; a 23-year contract for 8 Bcm/year also via the Transbalkan pipeline, which ends in 2021; and a 25-year contract for 16 Bcm/year via the Blue Stream pipeline, which ends in 2022.
