Turkey's Energy Demand, Production and Policies

Turkey is currently one of the fastest growing economies in the world with the largest increase in the energy demand among the OECD countries. Since the country has limited reserves for oil, natural gas and coal, this increase in energy demand is not able to be met through domestic energy production alone, which possess a threat on the country's economic growth, national security and industrial well-being and therefore various regulations and policies are being developed to reduce the reliance on foreign energy sources. In this paper, the natural energy sources of Turkey are evaluated, current efforts to fully utilize these potential sources are examined and the governmental approaches and incentives to increase domestic production are studied in a systematic manner. The study concludes that even though tremendous efforts have been made to explore and efficiently utilize the domestic resources by the government through various legislations, guidelines and taxation; the domestic resources will not seem to be sufficient in the short run and energy imports will be necessary to meet the energy demand in the next decades. Keywords: Energy demand; natural resources; energy policies; Turkey JEL Classifications: O220; O250; Q280