31 July 2018•Update: 02 August 2018
By Murat Temizer
ANKARA
The European Commission's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) allocated around €5 million to the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline project (TANAP), the TANAP company announced Tuesday.
The company said the project was one of two natural gas projects that received financial support from the CEF Energy program.
The CEF is a key EU funding instrument to promote growth, jobs and competitiveness through targeted infrastructure investment at a European level.
In accordance with the program, European Union member countries agreed to provide a total of €48.4 million per year in support of energy infrastructure projects. A total budget of €5.35 billion was allocated for energy projects for the 2014-2020 period.
Since 2014, TANAP received €15 million in total from European Union programs.
According to the European Commission, it supports the development of high performing, sustainable and efficiently interconnected trans-European networks in the fields of transport, energy and digital services. CEF investments fill the missing links in Europe's energy, transport and digital backbone.
The 1,850-kilometer-long TANAP was officially inaugurated on May 29 during a ceremony held in Baku with the participation of Azerbaijan's president.
TANAP, with around $8 billion of investment, will deliver 6 billion cubic meters of Azeri gas to Turkey and 10 billion cubic meters to Europe per year. The European part of the project is expected to become operational in 2020.
The estimated investment cost was $11.7 billion at the start of the project, but this figure has been revised down to $8 billion based on updates from project managers.
€1 equals Turkish liras 5.75.
