Vision 2023: Forecasting Turkey's natural gas demand between 2013 and 2030

Natural gas is the primary source for electricity production in Turkey. However, Turkey does not have indigenous resources and imports more than 98.0% of the natural gas it consumes. In 2011, more than 20.0% of Turkey's annual trade deficit was due to imported natural gas, estimated at US$ 20.0 billion. Turkish government has very ambitious targets for the country's energy sector in the next decade according to the Vision 2023 agenda. Previously, we have estimated that Turkey's annual electricity demand would be 530,000 GWh at the year 2023. Considering current energy market dynamics it is almost evident that a substantial amount of this demand would be supplied from natural gas. However, meticulous analysis of the Vision 2023 goals clearly showed that the information about the natural gas sector is scarce. Most importantly there is no demand forecast for natural gas in the Vision 2023 agenda. Therefore, in this study the aim was to generate accurate forecasts for Turkey's natural gas demand between 2013 and 2030. For this purpose, two semi-empirical models based on econometrics, gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita, and demographics, population change, were developed. The logistic equation, which can be used for long term natural gas demand forecasting, and the linear equation, which can be used for medium term demand forecasting, fitted to the timeline series almost seamlessly. In addition, these two models provided reasonable fits according to the mean absolute percentage error, MAPE %, criteria. Turkey's natural gas demand at the year 2030 was calculated as 76.8 billion m3 using the linear model and 83.8 billion m3 based on the logistic model. Consequently, found to be in better agreement with the official Turkish petroleum pipeline corporation (BOTAS) forecast, 76.4 billion m3, than results published in the literature.