Italy’s Draghi positive for Covid, will skip Africa energy trip

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Italy’s Draghi positive for Covid, will skip Africa energy trip

2:29 CAT | 18 Apr 2022

File photo: Reuters

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has tested positive for COVID-19 and ministers will replace him on a trip to Africa this week for deals to cut his country’s reliance on Russian gas, his office said on Monday.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has scrapped a visit to oil-rich Angola and the Republic of Congo after testing positive for Covid-19, his office said on Monday.

Draghi, 74, who is “asymptomatic,” was to fly to Luanda on Wednesday and Brazzaville on Thursday for talks on switching energy supplies from Russia, it said.

He will be replaced by Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio and the minister in charge of ecological transition, Roberto Cingolani.

Draghi was due to arrive in Luanda on Wednesday, where he was to meet with the president, João Lourenço, and the following day he was to travel to the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, to meet with President Denis Sassou N’Guesso.

ALSO READ: Draghi is betting on Africa for Italy’s exit from Russian gas

The trip is part of the Italian government’s efforts to diversify energy imports, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sources in the Italian executive explained to the Spanish news agency Efe.

Italy imports almost all the gas it consumes from abroad, around 90%, and approximately 40% comes from Russian territory.

Last Monday, Draghi travelled to Algeria, its second gas supplier after Russia, and managed to sign an agreement to import more from that North African country.

Italy, connected to the outside world by five pipelines, receives gas from Algeria through the Transmed pipeline, which starts from the Algerian Hassi R’Mel field in the far north of the Sahara, crosses Tunisia and the sea and ends in Mazarra del Valley, Sicily.

Italy received 22.6 billion cubic metres of gas in 2021 through this trans-Mediterranean pipeline,(in 1990, Italy imported half that, 10.6 billion cubic metres).

However, the Algerian pipeline has an even greater capacity of up to 27 billion cubic metres, Italy’s minister of ecological transition, Roberto Cingolani told Parliament on 22 March.

As part of this supply diversification strategy, Italian foreign minister Luigi Di Maio has recently stopped by other countries such as Azerbaijan, from where Italy received 7,2 billion cubic metres of gas in 2021 via a pipe across the Adriatic Sea, and Qatar, from where it imported 6.8 billion.

In the last month and a half Di Maio has also travelled to the Republic of Congo, Angola and Mozambique, and said that “all these countries have been willing to increase the supply” of hydrocarbons.

Draghi’s discussions in Congo and Angola this week were to focus — among other things — on boosting deliveries of liquefied natural gas, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, asking not to be identified discussing private information. That trip could be followed by travel to Mozambique, though plans hadn’t yet been confirmed, they said.

Source: Reuters / AFP / Lusa / Blomberg