Draghi arrives in Angola on Wednesday, 20 April, where he will meet the President, João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, in Luanda, and the following day he will travel to the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, to also meet with the head of state of that country. country, Denis Sassou N'Guesso.
The Italian prime minister's trip is part of his government's efforts to diversify energy imports, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Italian executive sources explained to the Spanish news agency Efe.
Italy imports almost all the gas it consumes from abroad, about 90 percent, and about 40 percent comes from Russian territory.
Last Monday, Draghi traveled to Algeria, his second gas supplier after Russia, and managed to sign an agreement to import more from that North African country.
Italy, connected to the outside by five pipelines, receives gas from Algeria through the Transmed pipeline, which starts in 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.
Through this trans-Mediterranean channel, Italy received a total of 22,584 million cubic meters of gas in 2021 (in 1990 Italy imported half, 10,559 million cubic meters).
However, the Algerian gas pipeline has an even greater capacity, of up to 27 billion cubic metres, Italian Minister of Ecological Transition Roberto Cingolani, with energy responsibilities, declared in Parliament on 22 March.
As part of this strategy of supply diversification, the Italian foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, has spent the last few months visiting other countries such as Azerbaijan, from where in 2021 Italy received 7,214 million cubic meters of gas, through a pipe that crosses the Adriatic Sea, or Qatar, from where it imported 6,877 million.
In the last month and a half, Di Maio also traveled to the Republic of Congo, Angola and Mozambique, and assured that "all these countries have been available to increase the supply" of hydrocarbons.
