ANKARA (Sputnik) – Turkey plans to start extracting and using natural gas from the newly found deposit off its Black Sea coast early in 2023, Energy Minister Fatih Donmez said.

The find of 405 billion cubic meters of natural gas in Sakarya field in 2020, Turkey’s biggest ever, rekindled Ankara’s hopes of weaning itself off energy imports. It plans to build an energy hub in the port of Filyos where the gas will come ashore.

Donmez told reporters during a Friday visit to the construction site of a gas processing plant in Filyos that the industrial complex could become operational in the first quarter of 2023.

“After this facility has been connected to the grid Black Sea gas will be used all across Turkey. The people of Turkey and the state will both benefit from it,” he was quoted as saying by the Turkish state news agency Anadolu.

The energy minister said that the processing plant’s initial operational capacity would be 10 million cubic meters per day and increase gradually to 40 million cubic meters. He said that the industrial zone could become Europe’s largest.