At their summit in Algiers, leaders of gas-exporting countries asserted their sovereignty over their reserves and their determination to promote the resource as affordable, accessible, sustainable and secure.

The 20-member Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) gathering came three months after COP28 in Dubai declared that planetary survival depended on a transition away from fossil fuels, with a goal of ending their use by 2050.

The Algiers Declaration presents gas as the cleanest source of energy in the transition from fossil to sustainable fuels.

The forum's Gas Research Institute, inaugurated in Algiers last week, is bent on developing gas with lower carbon and methane emissions.

Senegal was granted observer status at this gathering, making it the 20th member of the grouping, which was formed in 2001 with its headquarters in Qatar.

The GECF is known as the Opec of gas. Importantly, it does not seek to follow Opec in determining the price of its commodity.

Members of the GECF sit on 72% of the world's natural gas reserves and are responsible for 44% of the global production of natural gas.

The US, which in the past year has become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, is neither a member...