Love him or hate him, he is a gifted politician who has captured the attention of world leaders for one reason or another.
Now deep into the election campaign, Erdoğan has dug up one of his more flamboyant schemes. As he himself calls it, his “crazy and magnificent” plan for a second Bosporus-like canal for İstanbul linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It is a highly ambitious project. Erdoğan has certainly painted a beautiful picture of a cleaned-up Bosporus with little traffic where İstanbul’s citizens will be able to take part in water sports and enjoy sipping tea on unpolluted shores.
Presently, the 19-mile-long Bosporus Strait is the only shipping passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It is a major transit way for crude oil and other petroleum products. In 2010 over 2.5 million barrels of crude oil passed through the strait. The strait is a difficult body of water to navigate due to its treacherous currents and great twists and turns. At one point (just south of Kandilli) vessels must make a 45-degree turn, not easy for a giant ship. The volume of traffic is five times heavier than that of the Panama Canal. In 1936, when the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Turkish Straits was signed, the number of ships passing through was only 4,500 per year. Today, about 55,000 ships pass through each year (excluding local traffic). Of this, around 5,500 are tankers. The Montreux convention grants passage to all commercial vessels from all nations. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the strait it is very congested with tanker traffic going to and from Ukraine, Russia and Bulgaria, etc., many of them loaded with large amounts of oil or liquefied petroleum gas and chemicals.
Furthermore, the strait has special ecological conditions in terms of both marine and terrestrial environment since it connects two different seas, the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea, which have different salinity, temperature, etc. Moreover, being a transportation route for hazardous and dangerous materials poses environmental and safety hazards for the Bosporus Strait and the Marmara Sea and surrounding residential areas. Therefore, the strait is the most dangerous waterway in the world and some serious accidents have occurred in the past causing severe environmental destruction and loss of life and property; such as in 2009 when a tanker lost control and collided with a waterfront mansion and in 1991 when a collision with between two ships -- one of which was carrying livestock -- resulted in 21,000 sheep being drowned
Therefore, the new canal could divert traffic away from the strait. However, in reality it would seem that the chances of the project ever seeing the light of day are far from certain. While the few words that the prime minister has said about it make it seem like a good idea, there would be numerous challenges in the way of the project being realized including the estimated $50 billion cost of construction.
But putting the costs and construction aside, the main issue would be whether or not this new waterway would fall under the terms of the Montreux convention -- a question that has already been raised by Moscow.
Because the Bosporus is a natural waterway there can be no charges imposed by Turkey for commercial vessels to use it. However, this may not be the case with a man-made canal. Charges can be imposed for passage through man-made canals such as Panama and Suez. Charges for passing through the Panama Canal, for example, are around $100,000 per vessel per crossing. Therefore, unless this canal is free it is highly unlikely anybody would want to use it. For Russia, which is one of the biggest users of the Bosporus Strait, the idea of paying a fee is a non-starter. And in this case, how could it be commercially viable to build a canal through which traffic would pass for free?
Furthermore, even if it were built, we would be left with the same amount of vessels, albeit on another waterway, producing the same amount of pollution. Reducing Bosporus traffic to zero is somewhat far-fetched. Far more likely, would be a segregation of traffic into southbound and northbound routes. Far better still, would be to concentrate on building pipelines to transport oil, etc., and diminish the need for tankers.
As a Turkish official told me on Tuesday, this project is probably little more than a three-minute wonder with Erdoğan announcing it without putting any meat on the bones, simply to maximize votes in the elections. Once the elections are over it will likely fade away.
