Italy can boost African gas imports, Eni CEO says

Italy can boost African gas imports, Eni CEO says

Italy can significantly increase its gas imports from Africa and transfer some of the supply to northern Europe if it boosts its infrastructure in the next few years, the CEO of energy group Eni Claudio Descalzi told several Italian papers.

Speaking from Algiers where he travelled with Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Descalzi said that Rome could already count on many connections with Africa including the TransMed pipeline linking Algeria to Sicily.

"We are the only ones to have a connection with Algeria... which has a capacity of about 36 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas and is still under-utilised. There are still more than 10 bcm that can reach Italy," Descalzi told Italian daily Il Messaggero.

Algeria last year emerged as Italy's biggest gas supplier, replacing a significant part of the 29 bcm of gas that previously came from Russia.

In addition to TransMed, Rome could also count on a pipeline coming from Libya and imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Egypt, Angola, Congo Republic and Mozambique.

"We have a connection with Libya that is now worth about 12-14 billion cubic metres in terms of capacity, which can go up with adequate compression additions of several billion," Descalzi told the paper.

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