The President of the Italian Council Mario Draghi is expected this Monday in Algiers. The visit comes in a context of global tension on natural gas because of the war in Ukraine and is part of the ongoing dynamic, not of rapprochement, but of strengthening of relations between Algeria and Italy, since always good.
It is all the more symbolic as it comes only a few days after that carried out in Morocco by the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sanchez.
Ukraine, Algeria, gas: an interview with Abderrahmane Hadj Nacer
It will obviously be a question of gas essentially, as the component of the Italian delegation suggests. In addition to Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, the chairman of the energy group ENI and the Minister for Energy Transition are accompanying the Prime Minister on his trip to Algiers.
According to Reuters, Draghi is coming to sign an agreement to increase the quantities of gas delivered to Italy. The latter is the first customer of Algerian gas but wants additional quantities since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine to reduce its dependence on Russian gas which constitutes 40% of its imports.
According to the Al Arabiya channel, Algiers and Rome will sign an agreement bringing a 50% increase in gas deliveries to Italy on the occasion of this visit, ie a quantity of 9 to 10 billion m3 per year. In 2021, Algeria supplied 21 billion m3 of gas to Italy which imported 29 billion m3 of gas from Russia, according to the same source.
The signing of such an agreement had been foreseeable for several weeks in view of the official declarations made on the side of Algiers. At the end of February, that is to say in the first week of the war in Ukraine, Luigi Di Maio went to Algiers, followed by a delegation of senior officials from the giant ENI.
Asked by the daily Liberté about Algeria’s readiness to respond to European requests to supply more gas, the CEO of Sonatrach, Toufik Hakkar, reported unused capacity on the Transmed gas pipeline linking Algeria to Italy which could be used to transport additional quantities.
With a capacity of 110 million cubic meters per day, the gas pipeline transports barely more than half of this quantity (60 million cubic meters).
The Ukrainian crisis has only accelerated the dynamics of strengthening the Algerian-Italian partnership, also boosted somewhere by Algeria’s falling out with Spain, the second European customer of its gas and which was also demanding additional quantities. with the ambition of becoming a European gas hub (American and North African).
“Bringing the two countries together with a little more”
In reaction to Spain’s spectacular turnaround on the Western Sahara issue, an Algerian source told the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial on March 25 that Algeria will respect its contractual obligations, but, outside of this framework, “it will modulate its relations with certain partners from southern Europe who have invested in Algeria and who maintain excellent traditional relations with our country”.
More explicitly, the source added that “Italy is fully qualified to become the gas hub in the region given the capacity of the Enrico Mattei gas pipeline and the demand and availability displayed by the operators of this friendly country”.
At the end of last October, the Transmed renamed the Enrico Mattei gas pipeline, after the CEO of ENI, a friend of the Algerian revolution. In March, the Reuters agency reported that the Italian group was about to buy back assets from BP in Algeria, consolidating its position as a major investor in the Algerian energy sector.
The Algerian-Italian agreement has everything to go beyond gas, say observers, however.
“In hard times, Italy has always been there (…) I would say that now is the time to define a mixed industrial policy with Italy. Not to exchange oil and gas for a few industries, but downright to intertwine the two countries a little more, to the point of exchanging shares between Sonatrach and ENI”, suggested the former governor of the Bank of Algeria, Abderrahmane. Hadj Nacer, in an interview published Saturday on TSA.
