Will the Italian gas hub be built in Minerbio?
Making Minerbio, where Transmed ends, a gas hub is a dream: to achieve it, more national production is needed. The analysis by Davide Tabarelli, economist and president of Nomisma
Times are long in terms of energy, a bit like the 2,200-kilometre pipeline that runs from the middle of the Algerian Sahara to Minerbio, near Bologna. So today Mattei's visions of the 1950s are used in defining our new policy towards North Africa . He was a white partisan and founded ENI in 1953 and died in an attack in 1962, but in just 9 years he defined objectives that are still valid today, some of which have even been achieved, such as the Transmed gas pipeline, as we call it, or the « Enrico Mattei line», as the Algerians prefer to call it. In reality he didn't invent much, if anything he strengthened what the Italians had already done before, even with the old Agip, i.e. strengthening relations with the producing countries, with a proverbial attention to people.
ALGERIA EXCEEDS RUSSIA IN GAS SUPPLIES TO ITALY
The help Mattei gave to the revolution against French colonialism is not forgotten in Algiers, a closeness which, according to some hypotheses, is at the origin of the attack on Mattei. One wonders what the French think of Italy's activism today. Meanwhile, in 2022 the pipe became Italy's main gas supply channel, with 24 billion cubic metres, 3 more than the previous year, and, based on the agreements signed, it should rise to 30 billion in 2026. Russia in 2021, before the war, gave us 29 billion, which fell to 11 in 2022, while in 2023, if it continues as in these days, during which volumes continue to arrive, we will still be at 5 billion.
In the past they have always exchanged primacy, with Algeria which had already been first in the early 2000s with 29 billion cubic metres, thanks also to the then recent expansion of capacity to 36 billion. Then came gas from Libya, for which Trasmed had to make room in Sicily and, more recently, gas from Azerbaijan, via TAP, which always feeds into Trasmed further north. Today there is a bottleneck in bringing gas from Algeria to the north, where consumption is concentrated, and where, moreover, Russian gas arrived. Without building plants in Italy, in particular a new transport line on the Adriatic side, there is little point in having more gas in the south.
ITALY GAS (AND OIL) HUB?
The second objective of the visit to Algeria is more modern, that of making Italy a hub, an interconnection, of energy for Europe, but we have already been for 50 years for Europe's even more important source, the oil. With our 6 refineries overlooking the Mediterranean, we are one of the most important centers in the world for petroleum products.
We have been talking about gas hubs since the end of the 1990s, when Europe wanted to repeat the positive experience of the only major hub in the world, that of the Henry Hub in Louisiana, in the deep south of the United States where a dense network of pipelines arrives from which the large gas pipelines leave for New York and Washington where the gas is consumed. It is there that in 1990 the Nymex exchange launched the forward contract for gas, the price of which has become the reference for the whole United States and is now also the reference for LNG exports, many to Europe, made from the terminals of the Texas. The information efficiency of the hub was also obtained thanks to the extraordinary increase in gas production by thousands of producers, many frackers, which give thickness to the offer and liquidity to the market.
Minerbio, where Transmed ends, is one of the largest storage facilities in Europe, is connected to the Adriatic LNG regasification terminal and will soon be connected to the new Ravenna regasification terminal. From there all the lines depart for the main consumption centers of the Po Valley. Once much of the abundant national production also converged there, but today it has dropped to 3 billion cubic meters, the minimum since 1954. It is a dream to have a Minerbio Hub for gas, but if we want to achieve it, we need more national production, the first objective which belonged to Mattei even before he left for abroad.
(Excerpt from an article published in Il Sole 24 Ore )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/italia-hub-gas-minerbio/ on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 05:54:01 +0000.