The oil company Repsol has put on hold the green hydrogen projects planned in Spain, with an electrolysis capacity of 350 megawatts (MW), due to an unfavorable regulatory environment, according to a company spokesperson.
The company had already warned that regulatory uncertainty, including the possibility that an extraordinary tax on energy companies and banks could be redesigned and made permanent, could affect its investment in the nascent industry.
A 100 MW project in Cartagena, with a planned investment of more than 200 million euros ($217 million), is among those that have been put on hold, along with other projects in Tarragona and the Basque Country, with capacities of 150 MW and 100 MW respectively.
In October of last year, Repsol already launched its first electrolyzer in the Petronor industrial center (Euskadi), with 2.5 MW and a capacity to generate 350 tons of renewable hydrogen per year, after an investment of 11 million euros.
Repsol’s next electrolyzer will be built in Portugal. The company has chosen its Sines Industrial Complex to invest 15 million euros in a new renewable hydrogen project, in its commitment to the company’s decarbonization. This is a project for a four megawatt (MW) electrolyzer with a capacity to generate about 600 tons of hydrogen per year.
Company sources indicated their decision to invest in Portugal, a country where the expansion of the Sines Industrial Complex has full support as it is considered by the Portuguese Executive as an initiative of Potential National Interest (PIN), a reserved rating. for investments that make a significant contribution to the country’s economy.
At the same time, these sources reiterated that in Spain “it remains in standby“the investment process in some of its industrial projects in the face of regulatory and fiscal instability. Last week, the Government announced that it included among the commitments sent to Brussels the “permanent maintenance” of extraordinary taxes on energy and banking.
Oil companies such as Repsol and Cepsa have been some of the companies that have most criticized the Spanish extraordinary tax, which has also sparked criticism from companies such as Endesa. Last year, the Spanish Association of Petroleum Products Operators (AOP) assured that an extension of the tax could endanger 16.5 billion euros in investments linked to the energy transition.
CCOO Reviews
On the other hand, the general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, has described it as “obscene” that companies, such as Repsol, which have had “profits and excess profits” in recent years, threaten to take their investments out of Spain due to the permanence of the extraordinary taxes on the energy and financial sector that the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, defended had to be maintained “permanently.”
When asked at an informative breakfast about Repsol’s threats to take investments to Portugal if the energy tax continues, Sordo has asked large companies to reflect to contribute “more equitably to the changes and transformations” of the country and “lower the piston a little” with measures that, in his opinion, in fiscal terms “are reasonable.
Thus, he has asked that those sectors that have had “enormous” profits in recent years contribute more to general well-being.
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