Keel Laid in Nantong: What the Sakarya Phase 3 FPU Hull Start Tells Us About Türkiye's Black Sea Gas Ambitions and China's Deepwater Fabrication Role

The keel-laying ceremony itself is a ceremonial milestone, but the transition it marks — from fabricating individual hull blocks to erecting them in the dry dock — is the point where a floating production unit stops being a design and a set of cut plates and becomes a structure whose sequence, tolerances and outfitting schedule govern delivery. For TPAO's Sakarya Phase 3 development, that transition happened at Wison New Energies' Nantong yard on 25 October 2026, and the company says it was on schedule.

The schedule matters more than the ceremony. This is the second floating production facility Türkiye will deploy on Sakarya, and the first built new rather than converted. It sits on the critical path not just for Phase 3 output but for the wider arithmetic of Turkish gas supply in the early 2030s.

The unit, and where the published figures disagree

Wison's own releases and trade coverage give a consistent core specification, with a few noteworthy discrepancies across Turkish government and Chinese yard sources.

The 282 m versus 273 m hull-length discrepancy is almost certainly a definitional artefact — extreme length versus moulded length, or a design firm-up between August 2025 and February 2026 — but it is the kind of detail worth flagging because hull envelope determines dock fit, tow configuration and, critically, Bosphorus transit feasibility.

That last point is the engineering constraint that shapes everything about this unit. Wison has stated the FPU must transit with a 56 m air-draft restriction to pass the Bosphorus. Together with the 54 m beam, this effectively rules out a heavily pre-outfitted sail-away: topsides modules that would breach the air-draft limit must be deferred, mated offshore or installed by heavy-lift vessel after transit. For a yard used to delivering complete topsides, this is a logistical complication with a direct cost and schedule consequence. It also explains why the topsides lifting campaign (June 2027 per Wison) sits in a tight sequence ahead of an end-2027 float-out and sail-away.

The schedule chain, and why it is the real story

The dates, assembled from Wison releases and Turkish government statements, give a clear picture of a compressed programme:

• Aug 2025: Türkiye announces the Chinese contract; platform to sail by end-2027, commissioning mid-2028.
• 1 Sep 2025: EPCIC contract signed (engineering, procurement, construction, installation, commissioning).
• Feb 2026: Construction formally commences at Nantong; first steel cut for the hull.
• May 2026: Topsides fabrication starts; major module lifts scheduled June 2027.
• 25 Oct 2026: Keel laid; hull block assembly begins in dry dock.
• Apr 2027 (target): Hull float-out.
• Jun 2027: Topsides module lifting.
• End 2027: Sail-away.
• Mid 2028: Commissioning complete.
• ~2030: Phase 3 commercial production.

Read as a whole, this is a roughly 27-month yard programme from steel cutting to sail-away for an ultra-deepwater gas-processing FPU — aggressive but not implausible for a yard with Wison's hull erection capacity (its Nantong dock is listed at 370 m × 68 m, comfortably accommodating a 282 m hull, with 2,000 t and two 440 t gantry cranes). The risk is not the hull; it is the interface between hull completion, module lifting, and the offshore installation campaign that must follow.

That offshore campaign is where the schedule could break. Subsea7 has reportedly been awarded the tow-out, mooring installation and connection scope for 2027–2028, and Saipem holds the flowline and export-pipeline package (~US$1.5 bn, ~3 years, with Castorone scheduled in 2027) plus a 183 km, 24-inch trunkline to Filyos. Baker Hughes is supplying deepwater horizontal trees and controls. These are parallel critical paths, and any slip in the subsea or pipeline schedule would strand the FPU or force a delayed hook-up.

The commercial significance: displacing imports at scale

25 MMcmd is roughly 9.1 bcm per year if run at full capacity. Türkiye's total gas consumption has hovered in the 50–60 bcm range in recent years, so a single Phase 3 FPU at full rate would cover a mid-teens percentage of national demand. Add Phase 2 — which, per Wood Mackenzie's Ashley Sherman, is expected to meet nearly 30% of Turkish gas requirements by 2030 — and Sakarya's cumulative contribution becomes material to Türkiye's import bill and to its leverage in long-term pipeline and LNG contract negotiations.

The 405 bcm reserve figure is worth treating with a degree of caution. It is widely repeated as "proven," but reserve classifications in a frontier deepwater play of this kind typically evolve with appraisal drilling and production performance. The strategic point stands regardless: Sakarya is Türkiye's largest gas discovery and the anchor of its domestic-supply strategy.

What is analytically notable is that the Phase 2 facility is a conversion — the Osman Gazi, a 300 m ex-FPSO purchased from BW Offshore and renamed — while Phase 3 is a newbuild. The shift from brownfield conversion to greenfield construction signals that TPAO has moved from proving up the field to industrialising it, and that it is willing to source that industrialisation from Chinese yards rather than Korean or Singaporean ones.

China's yards and the Black Sea

The geo-industrial dimension deserves more attention than it typically receives. Wison New Energies, formerly Wison Offshore & Marine, is not a marginal player in floating production; its EPCIC model — taking engineering through commissioning rather than just hull fabrication — places it in a narrow group of contractors able to deliver a complete FPU. The Sakarya Phase 3 award, signed within days of Türkiye's August 2025 announcement, is a meaningful endorsement of that model by a state oil company with strong Western alignment.

The ceremony's attendee list is telling: Türkiye's Deputy Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, the Consul General in Shanghai, TPAO's VP for Technical Affairs, and DNV representatives. The presence of DNV is consistent with class-society involvement in design and verification, though the specific classification scope is not publicly documented and should be treated as unconfirmed. The diplomatic weight of the delegation suggests Ankara views the project as strategically significant, not merely a procurement transaction.

For the wider offshore fabrication market, the takeaway is that Chinese yards are now credible bidders for ultra-deepwater gas-processing FPUs in the Black Sea — a region where Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian operators are all pursuing Black Sea gas. If Sakarya Phase 3 delivers on schedule, Wison has a reference project that will be hard for competitors to match on price.

What to watch

The keel laying confirms the programme is on track at the hull stage. The decisions that will determine whether Sakarya Phase 3 hits its 2030 production target are still ahead:

1. Hull float-out in April 2027. A slip here cascades directly into the June 2027 module lifts and the end-2027 sail-away.
2. The Bosphorus transit plan. How much topsides work is deferred past the 56 m air-draft limit — and whether the offshore completion campaign (Subsea7, Saipem) is genuinely resourced to absorb it.
3. Subsea and pipeline readiness. Saipem's 183 km trunkline and Castorone's 2027 window are the least forgiving parts of the chain.
4. Reserve booking. Whether the 405 bcm figure is revised upward or downward as Phase 2 production data accumulate will shape the case for further phases.

For steel and fabrication supply chains, the near-term signal is straightforward: a 282 m, 54 m double-hull FPU with ~26,200 t of topsides (a figure from TP-OTC's lender information package that I have not independently verified) represents a substantial plate, structural steel and module-fabrication workload, most of it sourced in China. The follow-on question — whether Türkiye's own yards, or European fabricators, capture any of the Phase 4 or satellite tie-back work — remains open.