Türkiye’s oil drilling: A strategic inflection point for Somalia
Long seen as a site of crisis and intervention, Somalia may now be approaching a turning point—one driven not by aid or security, but by energy, investment, and shifting geopolitical interests, with Türkiye’s offshore drilling mission at its centre.
Türkiye’s decision to pursue offshore oil drilling in Somalia marks a potentially consequential inflection point, with implications that extend beyond immediate economic gains.
It presents an opportunity to recalibrate Somalia’s fiscal foundations, enhance its strategic relevance, and reshape its engagement with regional and international actors.
In this sense, the initiative carries the potential to shift Somalia from a position of structural vulnerability toward one of greater agency within an evolving geopolitical landscape.
However, such outcomes are neither automatic nor guaranteed. The extent to which this moment proves transformative will depend on the country’s capacity to strengthen governance frameworks, consolidate institutional resilience, and exercise strategic foresight in managing both resources and partnerships.
Challenging Narrative
For decades, Somalia has been framed predominantly through the language of crisis; security threats, humanitarian need, and institutional fragility. Counterterrorism, piracy, and cross-border crime have dominated external engagement, relegating economic development, investment, and long-term state-building to secondary concerns.
International engagement has largely reflected this framing, prioritising securitised risk management over long-term economic transformation. In doing so, it has entrenched a model in which Somalia is managed rather than developed.
Even development assistance has operated within this securitized framework. Significant portions of aid have been allocated toward logistics, protection, and operational costs associated with working in high-risk environments, rather than towards long-term economic and institutional development.
As a result, Somalia has remained heavily dependent on external support while lacking the economic foundations necessary for sustainable growth.
This model is increasingly unsustainable. Donor fatigue, shifting geopolitical priorities, and economic constraints within donor countries are contributing to a gradual contraction of aid. Somalia can no longer rely on external assistance as the primary pillar of its economic strategy.
It is within this shifting landscape that Türkiye’s entry into Somalia’s offshore energy sector must be understood. Within this context, Türkiye’s decision to initiate offshore oil drilling in Somalia represents more than a commercial venture.
It represents a strategic inflection point that could recalibrate how Somalia is perceived and engaged: from a chronic security burden to a state with emerging economic and geopolitical value. Türkiye’s entry into Somalia’s energy sector challenges existing narratives at its core.
Somalia’s Potential Energy Sector
Following the completion of extensive seismic surveys conducted by the Oruç Reis vessel last summer, Türkiye has now deployed a deep-water drilling ship, Çağrı Bey, expected to begin drilling operations within the month of April.
The operation targets the Curad-1 well, located roughly 370 kilometers offshore, within one of three designated offshore blocks covering approximately 15,000 square kilometers under the 2024 Somali–Turkish hydrocarbon exploration agreement.
As Türkiye’s first offshore drilling operation beyond its maritime jurisdiction, the mission has been described by Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar as a “historic step,” underscoring both its strategic ambition and symbolic significance.
Oil exploration in Somalia is not new. Italian and British geologists identified oil seeps during the colonial era, and from the 1950s until the collapse of the central government in 1991, major international companies, including Shell and Total, conducted exploratory activities.
While hydrocarbons were discovered, these efforts never translated into commercial production before state collapse and prolonged conflict halted further development.
Unlike previous oil partners, Türkiye has demonstrated a higher level of strategic commitment and risk tolerance, showing readiness to invest substantial capital in Somalia’s hydrocarbon sector.
Importantly, Türkiye’s engagement is state-led rather than purely corporate, allowing it to secure exploration and drilling security infrastructure, including naval assets and security personnel, thereby mitigating operational and security risks.
What distinguishes the current moment is not geology alone, but geopolitics.
Strategic Realignment
Türkiye’s intensified engagement with Somalia must be understood against the backdrop of shifting regional dynamics, particularly the 2024 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Ethiopia and Somaliland, under which Addis Ababa pledged recognition in exchange for Red Sea access.
Despite widespread regional and international condemnation, the MoU exposed the limits of diplomatic protest and underscored Somalia’s vulnerability in a rapidly hardening geopolitical environment.
Confronted with this challenge, Mogadishu moved decisively. The Somali government concluded a comprehensive economic and defence agreement with Türkiye, encompassing maritime security, naval capacity-building, protection of territorial waters, and cooperation in maritime trade and port development.
Hydrocarbon exploration soon followed, consolidating a partnership that now spans security, sovereignty, and economic strategy.
While these agreements have attracted criticism, particularly concerns that economic terms may disproportionately favor Türkiye or intensify competition among external actors, they have nonetheless constrained Ethiopia’s ability to operationalize its Somaliland MoU and helped generate the diplomatic conditions that culminated in the Ankara Accord, reaffirming commitments to Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In this sense, oil is not merely an economic asset; it is a strategic political instrument. Somalia has the potential to enhance its relevance within regional and global systems, thereby increasing the costs for external actors seeking to undermine its sovereignty.
Fiscal Leverage
Somalia’s economic reality remains stark. Its economy is narrow, fragmented, and overwhelmingly informal, shaped by decades of conflict, weak institutions, and limited state reach.
Under such conditions, the government has little capacity to extract sufficient domestic revenue through taxation without risking economic disruption or social resistance.
Compounding this challenge, the aid-dependent order that has sustained Somalia for decades is visibly eroding.
The closure of the USAID under the Trump administration, long one of Somalia’s largest and most influential donors, marked a decisive shift, soon reinforced by donor fatigue and mounting economic pressures within donor countries themselves.
Somalia can no longer base its political or economic planning on the assumption of sustained aid inflows.
It is in this context that prospective oil revenues assume strategic importance. If managed transparently and governed through credible legal and fiscal frameworks, hydrocarbons could provide a rare source of domestic revenue capable of financing core state functions, basic service delivery, and security provision.
More importantly, oil income could introduce a new form of bargaining power, reducing Somalia’s structural dependence on external assistance and enabling greater autonomy in policy choice.
Economic Partner
Commercially viable oil production would also recalibrate how external actors perceive Somalia. Rather than a fragile state requiring containment, Somalia would enter a different category in the international system: a hydrocarbon-producing country with assets of strategic and economic relevance.
This shift would alter incentive structures, encouraging engagement driven by investment, energy security, and long-term partnership rather than short-term stabilization imperatives.
Crucially, oil would create interdependence. Energy firms, investors, and partner states would acquire a direct stake in Somalia’s regulatory credibility, infrastructure development, and institutional stability.
This could generate pressure for stronger governance, clearer federal–member state coordination, and improved transparency, transforming external engagement from episodic crisis management into sustained economic cooperation.
Yet this transformation is neither automatic nor risk-free.
Governance as the Determining Factor
The presence of natural resources does not guarantee positive outcomes. Indeed, numerous examples demonstrate that resource wealth can exacerbate corruption, inequality, and political instability in the absence of effective governance.
Somalia confronts deep structural constraints, notably fragmented federal relations, underdeveloped institutional capacity, and entrenched risks of elite capture.
Without strong legal and regulatory frameworks, transparent management of revenues, and credible accountability mechanisms, the benefits of oil could deepen instability rather than resolve it. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to extract oil, but to govern it.
Cautious Optimism
Türkiye’s oil drilling initiative does not guarantee Somalia’s economic transformation. But it opens a narrow and historically significant window, one in which Somalia is positioned not merely as a recipient of security assistance, but as an actor with assets, leverage, and strategic relevance.
Whether this moment becomes a turning point or another missed opportunity will depend less on geology than on governance.
For the first time in decades, Somalia has the possibility to renegotiate its place in the international system, from vulnerability to value. That shift alone is strategically consequential.
The author, Abdiwali Sayid, is a researcher and university lecturer in International Relations, as well as an analyst of the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on geopolitics and security.