The third vice president, Teresa Ribera, appeals to the “fluid” relationship between countries and takes the supply for granted
The turn of Pedro Sanchez in its policy regarding Occidental Sahara and Morocco has generated turbulence that threatens the price of gas than another Maghreb country, Algeria, supplies the Spanish economy. The Algerian state oil company Sonatrach pressed this past Friday with “recalculating & rdquor; the fees charged to naturgy for the energy that it distributes and that arrives via gas pipeline from North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula. A flow of significant magnitude, because although Europe trembles before the threat of Vladimir Putin to cut off their gas if they do not pay for it in rubles, most of the supply that reaches Spanish homes comes from Algerian territories.
The Third Vice President and Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa riverbank, has appealed to what he considers a “fluid & rdquor; relationship between countries and takes the supply for granted, as he declared this Saturday in an interview in ‘El País’. “They are still in the process of negotiating prices with Spanish buyers and I hope they reach an agreement sooner than later,” he maintained. However, the extraordinary rise in the prices of this raw material, as a result of the war in Ukraine, is a negotiating card in favor of the Algerians. But how much gas are we talking about when we talk about Algeria?
The Strategic Reserves of Petroleum Products Corporation (cores), a public entity linked to the Ministry for Ecological Transition, last week updated its statistics on the consumption and origin of the energy consumed in Spain. And Algeria’s weight in terms of gas is incomparable with any other partner: 42.8% of the gas that Spain imported during the last year came from that country. To put it in perspective, Algeria is to Spain what Russia to Germany, from where the Germans import about 40% of the gas they consume. In the Spanish economy the weight of Russian gas in imports is ‘only’ 8.9%.
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Geopolitics in the Maghreb already caused Algeria to cut off the gas supply through the gas pipeline that passes through Morocco on October 31, and part of that energy that now reaches Spain does so through the Medgaz, an underwater connection that unites Algeria with the Almeria coast. Also by ships known as ‘methane carriers’, which have gained weight in the distribution system.
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A logistical rupture for diplomatic reasons that temporarily caused Spain to tilt towards the gas that it supplies United States, historically the second Spanish supplier. Its weight in the balance sheet for the last year, according to Cores data, was 14.4% of total imported gas. However, if only the gas purchased in January 2022 (latest available data) is taken as a reference, the balance experiences a historically unprecedented turnaround: 34.6% came from the United States and 25.4% from Algeria.
If he ‘sorpasso‘ Will it be punctual or is it here to stay, given the tense geopolitical triangle between Spain, Morocco and Algeria, it will depend, in part, on the outcome of the negotiations that Naturgy and the Algerian state oil company Sonatrach have been holding for months. An actor who can play a relevant role in this relationship is Italyheavily dependent on Russian gas, which is also connected to Algeria through the gas pipeline transmed and that he has been flirting for months with the idea of compensating Russian food for North African food. In the European Union (EU), dependence is mainly on Russia, from where 38.7% of imported gas came from in 2020, followed by Norway (18.6%) and Algeria (7.2%).