Evaluation of natural gas strategies of Turkey in east Mediterranean region: A strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats and analytic network process approach

Abstract

Demand for natural gas has severely challenged the world supply among other types of energy sources such as coal, geothermal, nuclear and etc. Natural gas is the most important form of energy because it is clean, abundant, reliable and versatile. Due to the limited and transportable characterizes of natural gas, sharing pipelines for natural gas with other nations can either bring peace and stability or create chaos. To avoid insoluble strategies, it is very explicit to decide scientifically for these kinds of global issues. To do so, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) – ANP (Analytic Network Process) integrated approach is presented to evaluate natural gas policies for Turkey in terms of East Mediterranean Region. In the first step, the appropriate strategies, SO (strengths-opportunities), ST (strengths-threats), WO (weaknesses-opportunities) and WT (weaknesses-threats) are determined via SWOT analysis including four criteria, 20 sub-criteria and seven strategies. Due to inability of SWOT analysis to prioritize the criteria and rank the strategies, ANP approach which also considers the dependency between criteria is applied in the second step. Finally, the proposed SWOT-ANP approach is compared with other multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to represent the effectiveness and applicability of the model.