Süleyman ABRAVCI

Süleyman Abravcı is the Underground Storage Director at Naphtho Technical Group. He is a senior petroleum engineering and energy infrastructure consultant with over 30 years of experience, specializing in Underground Gas Storage (UGS) projects.

Throughout his career, he has played a leading role in the development and execution of Türkiye’s most strategic UGS facilities, including the Kuzey Marmara and Değirmenköy storage sites in Silivri, Istanbul. He has held various technical and managerial positions at TPAO, gaining comprehensive experience across the entire lifecycle of storage projects—from sedimentary basin screening and feasibility assessments to engineering design, construction, commissioning, and operational optimization.

As Director of Upstream and Underground Gas Storage Projects at Akfel Commodities, he led technical evaluations of Türkiye’s sedimentary basins to assess salt cavern suitability and evaluated the potential for converting depleted gas fields into storage facilities. He also conducted field studies on salt cavern development in southern Türkiye and performed detailed economic analyses of gas storage investments. In this role, he contributed to regulatory development, proposed optimization strategies for existing infrastructure, and introduced virtual storage approaches based on EU and U.S. best practices.

He later played a key technical leadership position in the Kuzey Marmara UGS Expansion Project (Phase III), which included offshore platform development, high-capacity injection and withdrawal wells, and the construction of surface processing facilities with daily capacities reaching 45 million cubic meters for injection and 75 million cubic meters for withdrawal. In addition, he led the modernization and capacity expansion of the Kuzey Marmara and Değirmenköy storage facilities, overseeing environmental permitting, engineering design, procurement, commissioning, and the implementation of third-party access agreements.

His expertise has also supported Türkiye’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) in the formulation of national third-party access regulations and contractual frameworks. His technical background covers the feasibility assessment of salt caverns and depleted fields for gas storage, optimization of operating storage sites, well construction and intervention, artificial lift system design for production wells, HAZOP and FEED studies, EPC/EPIC contracting, and the economic and regulatory evaluation of energy infrastructure projects.

Süleyman Abravcı holds an MSc in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Tulsa and a BSc in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ).