THE ALGERIAN GAS PIPELINE NETWORK: RELIABILITY, SUPPLY PERSPECTIVES, OPTIMAL EXTENSION AND ITS INTERCONNEXION TO THE EUROPEAN AND MEDITERRANEAN NETWORK

摘要

Algeria is an important gas supplier particularly to Europe. This paper presents the Algerian gas transmission pipelines perspective and provides the current gas supply and demand situation. As domestic-gas demand continues to grow, and to increase exports, this paper discusses the requirements for futur major pipelines development in the next years, and thus contribute to meet the increasing demand, particularly in the European and Mediterranean market. New export capacities will be determined depending on the routes and industrial or commercial and gas partnerships strategies.Strategic decisions for new supply of gas and storage infrastructures must be made years in advance because the security of supply is dependent on deliverability, available pipeline, and storage capacity. The paper illustrates Algeria's effort to reduce costs through the optimization of the global system. The conception and extension of a complex gas transportation network requires very important investment in addition to operating costs essentially due to maintenance costs. However to be efficient, the optimal extension of such a system must previously go through a technical diagnosis of existing works. The line transportation capacities fluctuate randomly and evolve according time in the sense of reduced performances mainly due to breakdowns, and obsolescence of compression equipments as well as the corrosion and the evolution of the internal roughness of the pipe. The approach we have in the paper associates local models of existing works reliability to a non-linear programming model with mixed variables solved by a generalised reduced gradient (GRG) type algorithm associated to a branch-and-bound type procedure.