Algerian national energy company Sonatrach has struck a deal with Turkey's Ronesans and Bayegan to build a petrochemical plant worth $1bn in Turkey, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on February 27.

Raw material supplied by Algeria will enable the facility in the Yumurtalik free zone of Adana province, southern Turkey, to produce 450,000 tonnes of propylene a year, Erdogan added. That would be enough to cut Turkey’s dependence on imported petrochemicals by around a quarter. Ankara also has big hopes that Turkey's Petkim, owned by Azerbaijan's Socar, will make an increasingly big dent in the country's petrochemical trade deficit by gradually expanding its operations near Izmir on the Aegean coast into a petrochemical production “supersite” valued at around $20bn. On February 22, Socar said it was scheduling a third-quarter start-up for Turkey's first new oil refinery in three decades, the $6bn Star facility which has been commissioned to supply petrochemical feedstock to Petkim.

According to Reuters, announcing the new petrochemical deal, Erdogan told a business forum in Algiers: “Algeria’s national energy company Sonatrach has signed an agreement for a $1bn petrochemical investment... with prominent Turkish companies Ronesans and Bayegan.”

Erdogan reportedly added that he wanted to triple the value of trade between Turkey and Algeria to more than $10bn a year.

Turkey is building up its investment and trade partnerships with African countries. Last year saw the opening of a $50mn Turkish military-run training base in Somalia, while Turkey has also agreed to rebuild a ruined Ottoman port city in Sudan and construct an airport in Khartoum.