Importance of Petrochemical Clustering in the Central Anatolia-Central Black Sea Region

Chemical industry products, make great scale contributions to the other industrial productions and chemical industrial cluster can only be completed by seaport based petroleum refinery. Increasing demand and imports of Turkey for the petrochemical products will mostly be met when the planned blue stream oil pipeline is connected to the proposed Samsun seaport oil refinery and its coordination with the regional industry and mineral deposites. Great salt mineral reserves like tenardite-glauberite in Ankara Polatlı, trona in Ankara Beypazarı and Kazan and rock salt in Kırıkkale, Çankırı, Çorum which have been discovered within the last few years, have increased twice the reserves and varieties of Central Anatolian salt deposits and will assure the second important raw material of petrochemical industry after nafta. The real loss in petrochemical foreign trade of Turkey, is big imports of primary and secondary chemicals produced from salt raw materials. The salt solutions from the natural gas storing caverns opened within the thick rock salt beds by solution mining process can be transported to future chloralkaline facilities in the region and to the Kırıkkale and proposed Samsun petroleum refineries by pipeline siphoning with minimum cost and the surplus can be swinged into the sea so that the environmental pollution is prevented. It is possible to see the existences of Kırıkkale petroleum refinery, defence industry, iron-steel-coke industry, Samsun sulphuric acid and fertiliser factory, gas-oil pipelines, various salt mineral resources, sea-ports, and transportation lines and other infrastructures suitable for the chemical industrial clustering within Central Anatolia and Central Blacksea Regions.