On 4 June 2026, in Aoulef, in the wilaya of Adrar, deep in the Algerian Sahara, ministers from three countries gathered for an unspectacular gesture: a first groundbreaking. It took roughly twenty years to get here. The Trans-Saharan gas pipeline project, conceived in the early 2000s, sealed by an agreement in 2009, revived by a memorandum in July 2022, had until now remained a line on maps. In early June 2026, construction finally began. But only on the Algerian stretch.
That detail changes everything. And it's the right entry point into the subject, because it captures both the ambition and the fragility of what Africa is attempting to do with its energy.
What has started, and what hasn't
The Trans-Saharan pipeline is meant to link Nigeria to Algeria via Niger, over 4,128 kilometres. It's carried by three companies: Algeria's Sonatrach, Nigeria's NNPC and Niger's SONIDEP. Its targeted capacity is 30 billion cubic metres a year, at an estimated cost of around $13 billion. Eventually, it would carry Nigerian gas to the Algerian coast, then on to Europe via existing infrastructure.
Eventually. The word carries weight. Of the 4,128 kilometres, only the 2,310 Algerian kilometres have entered construction. The Niger stretch, 841 kilometres, is mentioned for 2027 without confirmation. The Nigerian stretch, over a thousand kilometres, has no date at all. First gas, in the most cautious scenarios, isn't expected before 2029, and more likely between 2031 and 2033.
Of the 4,128 kilometres, only the 2,310 Algerian kilometres have entered construction.
In other words, what played out at Aoulef is, for now, mostly symbolic and political. One state decided to move forward alone on its own portion, without waiting for its two partners to be ready. Presenting this project as the birth of a continental corridor would be inaccurate. For the moment, it's a signal, planted in the sand, by the one of the three that had the most to gain from planting it quickly.
Two pipelines, the same gas, an old grudge
Because Algeria isn't moving into a vacuum. At the other end of the continent, Morocco is backing a rival project, the African Atlantic Gas Pipeline. The route is different, running along the Atlantic coast for nearly 6,000 kilometres, crossing thirteen countries, at an estimated cost of $25 billion. But the target is identical: the same Nigerian gas, the same European market. Two competing pipes for a single resource and a single customer. An infrastructure race to capture a flow, much like the rail and port corridors described in our coverage of the New Silk Roads and China's initiative.
| Trans-Saharan (Algeria) | African Atlantic Gas Pipeline (Morocco) | |
|---|---|---|
| Route | Nigeria → Niger → Algeria | Along the Atlantic coast |
| Length | 4,128 km | nearly 6,000 km |
| Countries crossed | 3 (Nigeria, Niger, Algeria) | 13 |
| Estimated cost | around $13 billion | $25 billion |
| Weak point | crosses an unstable Sahel | greater length and price tag |
This rivalry isn't only industrial. It's rooted in the diplomatic rupture between Algiers and Rabat, sealed in August 2021, and in the Western Sahara dispute that has poisoned their relations for decades. Energy has become a tool in it. In October 2021, Algeria let expire the contract that carried its gas to Spain via Moroccan territory. The pipe still exists; it's empty. Rarely has an infrastructure been so clearly turned into an instrument of strategic denial.
Each of the two projects carries its own weakness. The Trans-Saharan route is shorter and cheaper, but it crosses an unstable Sahel, where the security of a pipeline running several thousand kilometres is anything but a given. The Atlantic route avoids that insecurity by running largely offshore, at the cost of greater length and a bigger bill. Neither is yet a certainty. Both capitals know it, and each is betting that Europe, seeking alternatives to Russian gas, will eventually need its own.
Why the word sovereignty isn't misused here
It would be easy to reduce all this to a neighbourly quarrel. That would miss what's really at stake. For decades, African gas was designed to leave, heading north, often on terms dictated from outside. What these two projects sketch out, beyond their rivalry, is a will to control the chain, from the well to the point of sale, from within the continent. A shift that echoes the question raised by China and Africa at a strategic crossroads: who sets the routes, and on whose behalf?
Algeria gives a sense of the scale involved. In 2024, its gas exports reached 52 billion cubic metres, nearly a quarter of European gas consumption. The Trans-Saharan pipeline is presented as a flagship project of NEPAD, the development programme run by the African Union. Nigeria, Africa's leading gas reserve, has long been searching for a reliable route to monetise gas it still too often flares off for lack of an outlet.
Energy sovereignty, here, doesn't mean self-sufficiency. It means choosing your routes, your partners, your prices. That's a legitimate ambition, and it deserves better than either enthusiasm or scorn. It deserves to be looked at with its real timelines in mind — its 2,310 kilometres begun out of 4,128, and the thousands more still waiting.
What Tunisia stands to lose
For this magazine's readers, the question isn't a distant one. It runs, quite concretely, through a pipeline inaugurated in 1983 and named after Enrico Mattei: the Transmed. Over 370 kilometres of Tunisian territory, it carries Algerian gas to Italy. In exchange for the transit, Tunisia collects royalties, on the order of $600 million a year. More importantly, that same pipe supplies 66% of the country's gas consumption. When a Tunisian woman lights her stove or pays her electricity bill, chances are the gas got there through it.
The Transmed supplies 66% of Tunisia's gas consumption — and brings in around $600 million a year in royalties.
Yet transit royalties are already declining. From 2,064 million dinars in 2023, their peak, they fell to 1,525 million dinars by late 2025. And a question now circulates in the Tunisian economic press, one to raise as a hypothesis, not as a fact: if Algeria were tomorrow to prioritise the Trans-Saharan route and its direct outlet, could it lose interest in the Transmed, depriving Tunis of that windfall? Nothing has been decided. No closure has been announced. But the concern is real enough that ideas for repurposing the pipe are being discussed, toward hydrogen, ammonia or electricity.
This is where geopolitics stops being abstract. A construction site opened in the Adrar desert can, in time, weigh on the public accounts of a neighbouring country and, in turn, on the cost of domestic energy. In a Maghreb where household budgets are already stretched, where a rise of a few points on the bill is felt immediately, these pipes aren't an engineers' affair. They touch daily life.
A battle bigger than its pipes
What remains is not to get the scale wrong. This pipeline, even completed, won't turn the Maghreb into an energy power freed of dependence. Reliance on outside forces remains strong, markets are still dictated elsewhere, and gas rents, as we've long known, can lull an economy to sleep just as easily as they enrich it. Building a pipe isn't building sovereignty.
Building a pipe isn't building sovereignty.
What the Algeria-Morocco rivalry reveals, in the negative, is the absence of a shared project. Two neighbouring countries, speaking the same language and sharing the same history, are mobilising tens of billions of dollars to sell the same gas to the same customer, each one betting on the other's failure. You can see in that the energy of competition. You can also read in it the cost of a rift that nothing, for years, has come to narrow.
The groundbreaking at Aoulef nonetheless marks a change. For the first time in twenty years, the continent is acting instead of waiting. That's not much, and it's a great deal. What remains to be seen is whether this gas will mostly go toward paying for the next import, or toward funding what the Maghreb lacks most: a will to build together rather than against one another.
