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African natural gas could end the dependence on Russia for Hungary
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Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Europeans have been frantically searching for alternatives to Russian natural gas. Algeria has excellent opportunities to step up as a natural gas exporter as, without Russian exports, there is a great hiatus in the market. Algeria already exports natural gas to southern Europe and other countries prioritise Algerian imports too.
Robert Golob, the Slovenian prime minister, announced that Slovenia planned to build a pipeline to connect to the Algerian grid. This way Slovenia could reduce its dependence on Russia, and it would be able to transport Algerian natural gas to Hungary too. Slovenia has already signed an agreement on the already existing pipelines that run through Italy and could import Algerian natural gas. This agreement means 300 million cubic metres of natural gas a year, which can reduce Russian imports by a third for the small country.
Algerian natural gas
According to Portfolio.hu, Golob said that they wanted to help their neighbours, Austria and Hungary to reduce their dependence on Russian imports. He added, that alone they would not be able to do this as they needed a connection to other grids. But, Hungary could import natural gas from all of its neighbours. Still, 85 percent of natural gas is imported from Russia through TurkStream from the south. However, Golob had a discussion with Viktor Orbán, in which they agreed that the goal was to build a pipeline that could be operational in 2-3 years.
In the spirit of regional cooperation, the EU and its predecessor the European Economic Community has been structurally investing in its relationship with Algeria since it became independent in 1962:
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/algeria/european-union-and-algeria_en?s=82
https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/algeria_en
Interesting facts: Algeria was part of the EEC albeit with a “special status”, before its independence from France and is the EU’s third largest gas provider behind Russia and Norway.