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While Brazil produces plenty of oil in the pre-salt and still imports diesel to run its trucks, Turkey, which barely scratches its own subsoil, sent a drillship across half the world to Somalia to begin the most daring offshore drilling in its history, drilling from 3,500 meters of water in search of oil.
The well is called Curad-1 and is located about 370 kilometers off the coast of Mogadishu, in the Indian Ocean. It is the first time Turkey has taken a drilling operation outside its own territory, and it didn’t choose an easy place: the water depth there is 3,500 meters, and the goal is to drill to a total depth of 7,500 meters including the rock below the seabed. Before the drill descends, the research vessel Oruç Reis scanned 4,500 square kilometers of ocean floor with three-dimensional seismic.
A country almost without oil drilling where few dare
The part that makes me stop to think is the context. Turkey imports practically all the oil and gas it consumes, around 93%, and for years has been building its own fleet of drillships with names of Ottoman sultans to drill wherever it can, first in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, now in East Africa. The Curad-1 is being drilled by Çağrı Bey, one of these ultra-deepwater vessels, under a hydrocarbons agreement the country made with Somalia.
This fleet didn’t come out of nowhere. In the last decade, Turkey bought drillships on the international market and renamed them with sultan names, like Fatih, Yavuz, and Abdülhamid Han, building an offshore drilling capability that few countries outside the major oil companies possess. It was with them that the country found gas in the Black Sea, in the Sakarya field, and it is with this experience that it now ventures into the Indian Ocean. Somalia, with an almost unexplored coastline, entered the route as the new frontier of this hunt.
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It is a high-risk and extremely costly bet, in an Indian Ocean block where the traditional giants of the sector have never been. But it says everything about the energy hunger of those who have no reserves at home: if the oil is not under your feet, you cross the ocean to look for it under someone else’s.
3,500 meters of water, 7,500 of rock
To understand the size of the challenge, it’s worth breaking down the numbers. The 3,500 meters of water depth already place Curad-1 among the deepest drilling operations underway on the planet, because the drilling column needs to traverse this distance of sea before even touching the seabed. After that, there are still another four thousand meters of rock to overcome to reach the goal of 7,500. It’s the type of operation where pressure and temperature increase with every meter, and any failure costs a fortune.
The inverted mirror of Brazil
And this is where the comparison becomes uncomfortable. Brazil sits on one of the largest oil frontiers in the world, with Petrobras installing new platforms in the Búzios pre-salt and breaking crude oil export records. At the same time, the country imports diesel and gasoline because it doesn’t refine enough of what it extracts from its own sea. We have the oil and send the refined fuel to come from outside.
Turkey does the opposite. Without significant reserves, it turned the search for oil into state policy and went after it in extreme waters, just like China drilled more than ten thousand meters of rock in the desert to not depend on anyone. We often think that having the reserve is the end of the story, when in fact it’s just the beginning.
I confess I find myself imagining the world map with these arrows: Turkey going from Anatolia to the Horn of Africa to drill, China digging its own desert, and Brazil, with the treasure in its backyard, still discussing refining. It’s not a lack of oil that separates one country from another, it’s what each decides to do with the desire not to depend.
If a country without oil crosses the ocean to drill 7,500 meters, what justifies Brazil sitting on the pre-salt and still importing fuel?
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