The legal mechanism governing the import, export, distribution, and transport of natural gas will soon be in place. The Ministry of Energy Transition has prepared a first draft of this strategic piece of legislation. The draft bill has now been submitted for public consultation.
This new approach aims to modernize the natural gas sector in Morocco, in order to achieve a series of strategic goals, as stated in the text’s presentation note. These include «strengthening Morocco’s energy sovereignty, by modernizing infrastructures linked to the import of liquefied natural gas, and helping to reduce CO2 emissions by deploying a natural gas-based electricity generation system, which will enable more renewable energies to be integrated into the energy mix..». With this in mind, it is important to put in place a legal framework for the development of this sector and the improvement of its performance, while sending out strong signals to investors for the modernization of infrastructures and transmission and distribution networks.
In all, this piece of legislation, comprising 35 articles, aims to regulate the import and export of natural gas, its storage, transport, distribution, and other operations.
In detail, Article 3 of the draft bill states that any operator involved in several natural gas-related activities will be required to maintain an accounting system with financial reports dedicated to each of these activities.
With regard to natural gas supply and storage, the piece of legislation specifies that this activity must be carried out by an aggregator. A decree will have to define its remit and the governance mechanisms linked to this activity. In any case, this aggregator will be responsible for the public supply and storage service, and will be bound by a series of commitments. This includes «guaranteeing a secure supply of competitive natural gas for the Kingdom, signing contracts for the acquisition of liquefied natural gas with international producers and natural gas with producers exploiting local resources, respecting the principles of transparency and non-discrimination in the wholesale of gas...».
For its part, the transmission system operator will be considered as in charge of a public service. It will have to undertake to respect these commitments, according to criteria set by the department in charge of energy.».
Mohamed Ali MRABI
