WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- In the current superheated global energy market, with oil's price rising more than five-fold since 2000, the race is on worldwide to bring more crude to market, with many previously moribund pipeline projects being dusted off.

Turkey, which currently imports about 90 percent of its oil consumption of its daily 724,400 barrel per day requirements, primarily from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia, not only is competing fiercely for a share of the imminent Iraq oil piece, but also is making every effort to position itself as the region's pre-eminent energy transport hub.

For the energy-hungry world market, Turkey is already a key player as an important energy hub, for two reasons -- the Turkish Straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles), currently the world's busiest maritime strait, whose volume of traffic is exceeded only by the Straits of Malacca, and the $3.6 billion, 1,092-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

The Turkish Straits now carry three times the traffic of the Suez Canal; according to Turkish maritime authorities, tankers of 200,000 tons or more transit the Bosporus every 10 to 20 minutes around the clock. In 2006 more than 36,000 vessels transited the Turkish Straits, with tankers carrying over 140 million tons of oil. The passage poses significant environmental and safety risks to Istanbul, whose population makes it one of Europe's largest cities, and unique in that no other European city has volatile cargo transiting the city each day.

Ankara is hardly happy about this, especially as under the terms of the 1936 Montreaux Convention, the straits are an international waterway and Turkey is unable to collect transit revenues.