Ground Finally Breaks
Energy ministers from Algeria, Nigeria, and Niger met in Algiers on 3 June for the fifth ministerial meeting of the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline's steering committee. Days later, Algeria's state energy company Sonatrach began physical construction on its own section, in Adrar Province, running from the Niger border toward Hassi R'Mel, the country's largest gas hub and central dispatching centre. It is the first visible construction activity the project has produced since it was first conceptualised in the 1970s.
The numbers are substantial. The completed pipeline would run 4,128 kilometres from Warri, in southern Nigeria, through Niger, to Hassi R'Mel, carrying up to 30 billion cubic metres of gas annually into Algeria's existing export network, which already feeds Mediterranean pipelines into Europe. Cost estimates remain unsettled, with figures circulating between €12 and €18 billion, a wide enough range to suggest the project has not yet reached a firm financial structure. Niger's roughly 720km segment is targeted to begin construction in early 2027, financed and built by Sonatrach on Niger's behalf.
An Ownership Structure Built Around Who Actually Has the Gas
The project is structured as a trilateral joint venture: Nigeria's NNPC and Algeria's Sonatrach together hold 90 percent, with Niger holding the remaining 10 percent through its state oil company, SONIDEP. That split is worth sitting with. Niger is not a resource source for this pipeline, its gas comes from Nigeria, and its section is being financed by Algeria rather than by Niger itself, but the country still has to host roughly 720 kilometres of pipeline running through its territory. A 10 percent equity stake for the transit country, next to a 90 percent stake split between the two countries actually producing and buying the gas, is a governance choice that puts most of the financial upside with the two ends of the pipeline and comparatively little with the middle. Whether that asymmetry holds up over a multi-decade infrastructure asset, particularly if Niger's political situation shifts again, is a genuine open question rather than a settled one.
The Reason This Is Moving Now
The renewed urgency traces directly to Europe. Since 2022, the EU has been working to cut its dependence on Russian pipeline gas, and TSGP's 30 billion cubic metre capacity would meaningfully offset that gap if fully built and contracted. Updated agreements in 2025 refreshed feasibility work and addressed outstanding compensation and access issues between the three governments, clearing the way for Algeria's groundbreaking this year. The project has been formally linked to NEPAD, the African Union's continental development framework, since long before this year's revival, but it is Europe's post-2022 search for non-Russian supply that appears to have actually moved the financing and political needle after decades of stalled talk.
What Groundbreaking Does Not Resolve
Two things that stalled TSGP for fifty years have not gone away simply because Algeria has started digging. The route crosses some of the least secure territory in the wider Sahel and Sahara region, with active insurgent and terrorist activity a documented, longstanding risk factor along significant stretches of the corridor, not a hypothetical one. And the financing picture remains genuinely unresolved: a €6 billion spread between low and high cost estimates is not a rounding error, it is a signal that whoever eventually finances construction across Niger and Nigeria's sections is still working from an incomplete picture.
That combination, a physically difficult and historically insecure route, an unsettled cost structure, and an equity split that concentrates benefit at the pipeline's two ends rather than its middle, is the actual test of whether TSGP moves from Algeria's groundbreaking to full completion faster than it moved from 1970s concept to 2026 construction start. Fifty years is a low bar to clear. It is not obvious yet that this attempt clears it by much.
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