Moroccan Regime Sells Illusions to Its People Regarding the GME Gas Pipeline

The Spanish company Enagas published figures on the quantities of gas exported from Spain to the Kingdom of Morocco through the European-Maghreb gas pipeline (GME), which Algeria closed in November 2021.

Media close to the Moroccan regime took advantage of these figures to talk about the coup of “magic against the magician”, as it claimed, while talking about Algeria.

In a reading closer to misleading than to analysis, it was stated in one of the press articles that the high quantities of gas that Morocco imports from Spain through the closed pipeline in the reverse direction indicates that the first victim of the decision to stop work on the pipeline is Algeria, not the Kingdom of Morocco.

The media close to the Moroccan palace, while dealing with the increase in Moroccan gas exports from Spain through the closed pipeline, ignored the repercussions of the decision on the Moroccan interior affairs and on the economy in particular, which was painful, represented by the stopping of two electricity production plants (Tahdarat and Beni Madhar) for eight months (from November 2021 to June 2022), due to their complete dependence on Algerian gas, and they did not return to work until after agreeing on the reverse flow of gas from Spain towards Morocco, through the European Maghreb gas pipeline.

Most of the newspapers close to the Moroccan regime promoted a reading that Algeria is the biggest loser from the suspension of the Maghreb-European gas pipeline, which came in the context of the sanctions imposed by Algeria on Morocco in response to the “hostile acts” in which Rabat was involved, such as supporting terrorist and separatist movements and provoking Algeria in alliance with the Zionist entity to strike its interests.

How credible are these allegations? Why do the media in the orbit of the Moroccan palace insist on promoting such misleading analyses that underestimate the minds of the Moroccan people?

Before stopping the European-Maghreb gas pipeline, the Moroccan regime used to obtain nearly one billion cubic meters of gas annually in the form of traffic fees for the pipeline that connects Algeria to Spain through Moroccan soil, in addition to preferential prices in the event of a request to buy more, in addition to financial liquidity estimated at millions of dollars.

Because Morocco does not have the infrastructure for storing and distributing, it has facilitated the passage of the pipeline on its soil to distribute the gas in its natural form as gas, without making changes to its original condition, which means not spending a single penny in buying gas, but rather in distributing it without making changes on its condition from natural gas to liquefied gas for storage, and then to natural gas until it becomes exploitable.

As for the current situation, in which the Moroccan regime imports gas from Spain through the reverse flow of the pipeline, it pays for that exponentially, because the gas that it used to get from Algeria for free in the form of fees for the passage of the stopped pipeline, now it buys it from the international markets at the current prices, which have risen to record levels after Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, as it sometimes increases by 300%.
Further, the Moroccan regime buys gas from international markets in the form of liquefied gas and not natural gas, so it is transported through giant gas tankers, and this means that the price is added to the fees for converting from the gaseous state to the liquid state, and then again it is converted to its gaseous state in Spanish vehicles with other additional fees because Morocco does not have vehicles to dilute or transfer the gas, and this means that Morocco is now buying gas that has been converted from natural gas to liquefied gas, then to natural gas again, and every time the price doubles, it is added to the transportation fees via huge steamships, which price also rose dramatically after the Russian-Ukrainian crisis.