It has been the same story every week for just over a year in Algeria: after Friday prayers huge crowds take to the streets to vent their anger. They want the “system” established during the long reign of ousted president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to end, the gang that has looted the country to go, and to usher in a new free and democratic republic. Such demonstrations take place not only in the capital, Algiers, but also in many towns across the country.
The arduous election as president on December 12th 2019 of Abdelmadjid Tebboune, hand-picked by the army, did not take the wind out of the sails of the Hirak movement, the series of massive protests that began in February 2019 and brought about Bouteflika’s resignation the following April, after two decades in power. Nor did the repressive response to the demonstrations, which included numerous arrests and widespread intimidation.
It has been an unprecedented citizen revolution, one both peaceful and democratic, marked by victories, missteps and setbacks. Now fresh grievances are emblazoned in capital letters on demonstrators’ placards, taking issue with the government’s plans to exploit Algeria’s shale gas deposits. It is the talk of the country.
Typical slogans include: “No oil, no shale gas. Tell France to extract it in Paris”; “Tebboune is not legitimate – No shale gas”; “Neither dialogue nor consultation, they sent us a president who wants to sell the Sahara”; “Shale gas is a danger for Algerians”; and “Shale gas, a total disaster”. In the last example, the word “total” is underlined in red and, according to news website Toute sur l’Algérie (TSA – “All about Algeria”) is a direct reference to the French energy giant Total.
It was the new president himself who reignited the shale gas controversy in his first major news conference since coming to power. “Everyone should know that it is gift from Allah the all-powerful and I see no reason to go without it. Exploiting it will improve people’s standard of living,” Tebboune told reporters on January 22nd.
If he wanted to further alienate a population that already contests his legitimacy, Tebboune could not have found a more explosive issue to put back on the table. Even top government officials don’t see eye to eye, thanks to the threat shale gas poses to the environment and public health. At least two government ministers are fiercely opposed: industry and mines minister Ferhat Aït Ali and his higher education counterpart Chems Eddine Chitour, who is an energy expert. Speaking on state radio, the latter spoke out against the project, noting: “Total has been banned from producing shale gas in the south of France, but it might drill for it in Algeria. Shale gas is a calamity. We are going to mortgage the South’s future.”
As well as raising hackles, the new president has brought back memories of the events of 2015-16, when an extraordinary popular revolt in the far south of Algeria forced Bouteflika into a U-turn over his plans to exploit shale gas there. Despite the success of the uprising, few people in In Salah, a town of 50,000 inhabitants in the heart of the Sahara and close to gas deposits, have forgotten the security forces’ heavy-handed response.
The revived issue of shale gas has highlighted the recklessness of state oil and gas firm Sonatrach, and that of the Algerian government. Both appear ready to sacrifice precious natural resources such as water, and the health of Algerian citizens. The greed of multinational corporations is also evident. Several French companies have been implicated, including Total, accused of hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – in Algeria, even though the practice has been banned in France since 2011. And this episode comes fifty years after France conducted nuclear tests in its former colony.
Shale gas is often presented as a solution to the country’s dwindling conventional oil deposits, regardless of the dangers, exorbitant costs, and unprofitability associated with its extraction. Tebboune’s announcement is all the more worrying because it came just a few months after his predecessors forced though an amendment to hydrocarbons legislation that permitted shale gas exploitation and opened up the sector to foreign investors.
While the president did not give an overt green light to such extraction, and was careful to say that the “political decision would be made at the appropriate time, after discussions by specialists,” he did not raise the issue with journalists just by chance. Whether Tebboune was trying to reassure Algeria’s foreign partners, especially those who might invest in shale gas, has been widely discussed in the country’s press.
“This doggedness is the result of the various internal and external pressures facing Algeria,” Lachemi Siagh, a management consultant and expert in international finance, told TSA. “On the domestic front, we consume almost half of the gas we produce. At the same time, reserves are dwindling and there have been no major investments in recent years to strengthen and consolidate reserves.
“On the international front, there is a serious risk of losing market share. The Americans, once energy importers, are now net exporters and are approaching our traditional clients such as Portugal and Spain, among others,” added Siagh, who also spoke of the shale gas sector’s dangers, including water table pollution, cancers caused by the chemicals used in fracking, and the earth tremors the process can cause.
Activists echo some of these views. “Pressure from oil lobbies is behind this,” ecologist Messaoud Leftissi told the El Watan newspaper. “The Americans, who extracted shale gas with old equipment, are now trying to make it profitable in a rich, under-developed country. Algeria has the perfect profile for this,” he added.
Farhat Aït Ali has made the same point in the past. Will he stick to it now he is a government minister? “There’s no profit in shale gas,” he said in December 2018 on Algerian radio, well before coming into office. “In the United States there is even dumping. Their strategy is to control the world market, to flood it, but not for the money – the margins aren’t vast. Where the Americans pay $2.5 million for a well, the Algerians will pay at least seven. They are trying to sell us the surplus technology they can’t get rid of anywhere else. They insist we exploit shale gas, but don’t submit bids when tenders are put out. The Americans have always taken us for sheep and in a way they’re not totally wrong.”
For Hocine Malti, a petroleum engineer who co-founded Sonatrach and served as its vice-chairman, and who has written a book about the “secret history” of Algerian oil, and contributed to another about the Hirak movement*, resorting to shale gas makes no sense.
“As things stand, the United States has invaded the world with its very cheaply-produced shale gas,” Malti wrote in the daily Liberté. “It has progressed from being a gas importer to an exporter, including to Algeria’s traditional market, Europe. Shale gas now costs between $2.5 and $2.8 per MBtu to produce in the United States, compared to $12 or $15 in Algeria. Under normal economic conditions, and in the absence of political reasons, I can’t see an American oil firm coming to exploit shale gas in Algeria and getting burned.”
Malti suggested the president look at photographs taken in 2014 at a shale gas site a few kilometres from In Salah that depicts “camels, storks and other birds that died after drinking the water used for injection or after simply breathing the ambient air.”
There is a sense that by putting shale gas back on the agenda Algeria’s leaders have shown themselves to be incapable of thinking about the post-oil era, that they are blindly forging ahead at a time when oil and gas reserves are declining and when the economy is being kept afloat by printing money. With Algeria boasting the one of the world’s biggest reserves of shale gas after China and Argentina, they are hoping to find a new source of income.
In its shale gas road map, the new government has undertaken to exploit the fuel while being careful to “protect citizens’ health, ecosystems and, especially, water resources.” It also says it wants to develop renewable energy. The same promise was made in the time of Bouteflika, but despite the country’s vast potential for solar power, given its 2,000-3,000 annual hours of sunshine, the sector has barely got off the ground.
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- The French version of this artcile can be found here.
English version by Anthony Morland