Turkey has begun negotiations with Saudi Arabia to create a corridor to connect this country’s electricity to Turkey via Jordan and Syria.

Alparslan Bayraktar, Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, says the project could later be expanded to Lebanon as well; a country that is facing a severe electricity deficit.

Turkey is currently the region’s largest oil and gas transit hub and, besides the transit of natural gas from the Republic of Azerbaijan and Russia to European countries, it also routes Turkmenistan’s oil, Kazakhstan’s, the Republic of Azerbaijan’s, and Iraq’s Kurdistan region oil to global markets through the port of Ceyhan.

With the rapid development of renewable energy in recent years, Turkey has become a net exporter of electricity.

According to figures from Turkey’s Ministry of Energy, the country exported 1.7 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first five months of this year, and recently Iran’s Ministry of Energy also announced negotiations with Turkey for electricity imports.

According to a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, Turkey added more than 7,000 megawatts and Saudi Arabia nearly 6,000 megawatts to their solar and wind energy generating capacity last year. The figure for Iran was only 1,000 megawatts.