Turkey’s national oil and gas company is looking into partnerships and plans to raise funding this year to carry out work on the largest gas discovery in the Black Sea, according to Bloomberg.

In August last year, Turkey announced that it had discovered a deposit in the Black Sea that would contain 405 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The place where the natural gas was discovered is located about 150 kilometers from the coast of Turkey, at the intersection between the maritime borders of Bulgaria and Romania with the territorial waters of Turkey and close to the Neptune Block in Romania, the largest Black Sea gas discovery in the last decades.

According to sources quoted by Bloomberg, the Turkish Petroleum Corp. group, or TPAO, has had preliminary contacts with several international oil companies, including some of the big names in the industry, to extract gas from the Black Sea offshore field. However, there is a possibility that the negotiations will not end with a partnership, and the Turkish company will go further alone, according to Agerpres.

The capital investment required for gas extraction and shore delivery is estimated at about $3.2 billion, according to a source. In the 2021 budget, the Ankara government allocated TL 13.4 billion ($1.9 billion) to TPAO. It is not yet clear how much of this amount will be allocated to the Black Sea gas project.