The First Cargo Went to Canvey Island
In October 1964 a ship loaded liquefied gas at Arzew on the Algerian coast and sailed for the Thames estuary — the first commercial cargo of LNG ever traded between two countries, shipped by a state that had been independent for twenty-seven months. Almost everything Algeria has argued about since runs back to that voyage, including the reason its Roman cities are empty.
In October 1964 a ship called the Methane Princess took on a cargo of liquefied natural gas at Arzew, on the coast thirty kilometres east of Oran, and sailed for a terminal on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary, where she unloaded on 12 October. It was the first commercial cargo of liquefied gas ever traded between two countries. Algeria had been independent for twenty-seven months.
The plant that loaded it existed because of Hassi R'Mel, a gas field found in the Sahara in 1956 that turned out to be one of the largest on earth, and because of a problem: there was no pipeline from the middle of Algeria to anywhere that wanted to buy gas. Chilling methane to about minus 162 degrees shrinks it to roughly a six-hundredth of its volume, at which point a ship becomes a workable substitute for a pipe. Every LNG cargo since — and the world fleet now runs to several hundred vessels — descends from that trade. So, in a fairly direct way, does the Algerian state.
The company came before the country had an economy
Sonatrach was founded on 31 December 1963, eighteen months after independence, to build and run a pipeline. It is now the largest company in Africa by revenue and it is the reason Algeria works the way it does. Hydrocarbons account for something like ninety per cent of the country's export earnings and a very large share of what the treasury spends. That is not a statistic about energy. It is a statistic about politics: a government funded by selling gas abroad through one national company does not need to tax its citizens much, and a state that does not tax has a distributive relationship with its population rather than a contractual one. Everything from the price of bread to the difficulty of getting a tourist visa sits downstream of that.
24 February 1971
On that date President Houari Boumédiène announced that Algeria was taking a 51 per cent stake in the French oil companies operating on its territory and nationalising the natural gas fields and the pipelines outright. France responded with a boycott of Algerian crude; the dispute was settled inside about a year, largely on Algeria's terms. The date is commemorated every year — it is not one of the five fixed public holidays, but it is on every official calendar — and is treated in Algerian schoolbooks as the second half of a two-part independence — the political one won in 1962, the economic one taken in 1971. The reading is not propaganda. Whatever else the nationalisation did, it put the country's only source of foreign currency under the control of a single ministry, and it has stayed there.
Every serious political argument Algeria has had since 1962 has been, underneath, an argument about what to do with the gas money — and the ones that turned violent all began in years when there was less of it.
Three ways to Europe
The Transmed line opened in 1983, running east under the sea to Sicily and up through Italy, and it is named after Enrico Mattei, the Italian oil executive who had backed Algerian independence and died in an unexplained plane crash in 1962. The Maghreb–Europe line to Spain and Portugal, which crossed Moroccan territory, opened in 1996 and stopped on 31 October 2021 when Algeria declined to renew the transit agreement; capacity shifted to Medgaz, which since 2011 has run direct from Beni Saf to Almería without touching anyone else's soil. When Europe went looking for gas that was not Russian in 2022, Algeria became Italy's largest supplier. Three pipes are why a country most Europeans could not place on a map is a strategic supplier to several of them.
The year the price halved
In 1986 the oil price collapsed from around thirty dollars a barrel to under ten, and Algeria's export earnings fell by roughly half in a single year. What followed was austerity, import shortages and queues for basics in a country that had spent a decade importing everything. In October 1988 young men came out onto the streets of Algiers and other cities; the army was sent against them and killed somewhere between one and five hundred people, depending on whose count is accepted. The constitution of February 1989 ended the FLN's monopoly and legalised opposition parties. The first multiparty legislative election followed on 26 December 1991, the process was cancelled by the army on 11 January 1992, and the decade that came after it killed something in the order of a hundred thousand people. Prices recovered in the 2000s and the windfall went overwhelmingly on subsidies, housing programmes and imports, which bought social peace and produced almost nothing that earns foreign currency without gas in it.
Why there is nobody at Timgad
Morocco received more than fourteen million foreign visitors in 2023 and Tunisia takes around nine million a year. Algeria is the largest country in Africa at 2.38 million square kilometres, has the better Roman archaeology by a distance, and counts its arrivals in the low millions — most of them Algerians resident abroad coming home in August. This is not an accident of marketing. A state that earns nine-tenths of its foreign exchange from a pipeline has no fiscal reason to build hotels, train guides or make a visa easy to obtain, and Algeria has never seriously tried. The visa still means a consulate appointment, a hotel dossier and a wait of weeks.
For a visitor the result is peculiar and, if you can get in, entirely to your advantage. Timgad on a weekday in March holds a few school parties and otherwise the grid of a Roman city laid out for Trajan's veterans, standing to head height, with nobody on it. Petrol costs a fraction of the European price because the same rent that pays for the imports also holds the pump price down. The arithmetic that will eventually change all of this is already visible in the figures: domestic gas consumption keeps rising with a population near forty-seven million and an air-conditioned summer, and every cubic metre burned at home is one not exported. The hydrocarbons law of November 2019, written to attract foreign investment back into the upstream, was pushed through parliament over the Hirak protests that had already forced Bouteflika out that April. You will see none of this on the road east of Algiers. You will just be driving on it.