Algerian Energy Minister Abdelmadjid Attar stated that half of Algeria’s discovered and confirmed reserves of gas and oil have been exhausted.
The confirmed national oil reserve was estimated at 1.7 billion tons compared to 2500 billion cubic meters of gas reserves. In his radio interview in Algiers, the minister explained that these reserves will cover the country’s energy needs until 2040.
Algeria is seeking to transition to alternative energies and gradually abandon fossil energies, such as oil and gas, while working on developing current energy extraction methods, which Minister Abdel Majid Attar called for, in a way that protects reserves from depletion and prolongs their consumption period.
And at the end of the first week of October 2020, Shams El Din Chitor, Minister of Energy Transition and Renewable Energies, said that Algeria has one of the largest solar energy reserves in the world that can be relied upon in the future.
During recent years, Algeria has held contacts and consultations with Germany with the aim of completing a huge project to produce solar energy in the Algerian desert under, the “Desertec” project, which guarantees the country’s future supply of energy and the provision of a surplus for export. However, this project falters all the time for multiple technical and political reasons.
It is noteworthy that oil and gas energy is the almost only resource for hard currency in Algeria, and it constitutes about 98% of the country’s total exports.
