The President of the Italian Council, Mario Draghi, is making an official visit to Algiers on July 18 and 19, with the signing of an agreement worth 4 billion dollars, reports the French-language state daily. L’Expression in its July 19 issue. The natural gas supply contract brings together the American Occidental, the Italian ENI and the French Total and would make it possible to supply Italy with “very large quantities of natural gas”, in the words of the Algerian President, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, during a joint press conference with the President of the Italian Council, whose country, like the whole of Europe, has been trying to reduce its dependence on Russian hydrocarbons since the invasion from Ukraine.
From this week, moreover, under an agreement between the powerful Algerian national company, Sonatrach, and the Italian ENI, Italy will be able to benefit from an additional supply of 4 billion cubic meters of natural gas. . Very important agreements for both Italy and the European Union, which constitute a further step towards Algiers’ ambition to become “one of Europe’s suppliers of electrical, solar and conventional energy”.
The new agreement signed ratifies in the long term the status of Algeria as the first supplier of natural gas to Italy, notes in Italy the Corriere della Sera. A position already occupied by Algeria in recent months due to the geopolitical context in Russia.
For Algeria, which should benefit from these agreements given the current fall in the rate of the euro, a major financial windfall is looming. According to the statement of a former senior official of the Algerian Central Bank, quoted by the Pan-Arab news site Al-Araby Al-Jadid, “Algeria’s trade balance in 2022 will be largely in surplus, and the positive impact of the euro crisis will be felt in the level of foreign exchange reserves, which will improve significantly”.