Spain wants to become the center of energy supply in Europe and intensifies its campaign for the construction of a gas pipeline through the Pyrenees, basing itself on the pressing needs of Germany to overcome the reluctance of France.
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The energy crisis will probably be the main topic of discussions between the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, on Tuesday in Meseberg, north of Berlin, where Sánchez will participate “as the guest of honour” in a German cabinet meeting.
But beyond gas, the EU’s main focus of concern due to the war in Ukraine and Russian threats to cut gas supplies before winter, Spain’s long-term goal is to become the European “hub” for green hydrogen. And for this reason, this gas pipeline with France seems essential.
This project is called Midcat (short for Midi and Catalonia, the French and Spanish regions it would connect), and it would allow Spain – but also Portugal – to deliver gas to central Europe via France.
The Midcat project, which was born in 2013, was dismissed in 2019 by the French and Spanish regulatory authorities due to its environmental impact and its lack of economic interest, but the war in Ukraine, and the prospects of Russian gas shortages, returned it to the table.
The disinterest of Paris persists, leading Sánchez to reiterate “the determination” that the project be carried out, even if it is without going through France, through a submarine connection with Italy.
“If plan A doesn’t go ahead, then plan B will have to be found. And plan B” is “that energy interconnection between the Iberian Peninsula and Italy,” Sánchez said during a visit to Bogotá last Wednesday.
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And plan B is that energy interconnection between the Iberian Peninsula and Italy
help europe
The Spanish Ecological Transition Minister, Teresa Ribera, confirmed that the Italian alternative, that of an underwater gas pipeline between Barcelona and Livorno, is also being studied.
But “at an extremely critical moment for Europe”, it would be necessary to bet on “the easiest”, which is the route “through the Pyrenees”, he argued in an interview with Antena 3 television last Thursday.
“Spain does not need to export gas. Spain is willing to help Europe,” argued Ribera, calling for European involvement in a project that, according to her, could “be operational by autumn-winter 23-24.”
“It is not a bilateral issue between Spain and France. It is European construction,” he concluded in an interview published on Monday in the newspaper El Mundo. “Forgive me, France, I wonder where your European sense is, what we would do with a broken Germany.”
Berlin sees the project with good eyes, as evidenced in the invitation sent to Sánchez to attend a meeting of the German executive.
“I am very interested in a gas pipeline which, unfortunately, we lack today”, and which “would contribute enormously at the moment to alleviate and defuse the supply situation” Olaf Scholz said on August 11 about Midcat.
Spain has six liquefied gas regasification plants – and Portugal, one -, making it the country with the largest regasification capacity in the European Union.
Thus, the peninsula could become a European bridgehead for the gas that arrives in ships from the United States, while the transformation to renewable energies is completed.
On the horizon, green hydrogen
Spain and Portugal want the European Union to bear the cost of the construction, valued a few years ago at around 440 million euros.
The Midcat would not be built in any case before this dreaded winter, but it would end up serving to export green hydrogen, a plot in which Spain wants to become a world reference thanks to its renewable energies.
The so-called “green” hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water (separation of water molecules thanks to a current) using electricity from renewable sources, whether wind, solar or hydroelectric. Unlike fossil fuels, it only releases water vapor. That is why they consider it as the energy of the future.
“Spain is going to become the world’s first green hydrogen transport hub (…) which is the future of the European economy,” the president of “Foment del Treball” said in a recent interview with Spanish national television. , the organization that represents Catalan businessmen, Josep Sánchez Llibre.
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“The Midcat project is a long-term project,” the Minister of the Presidency and Pedro Sánchez’s right-hand man, Félix Bolaños, said last week in Paris. “It is intended that in the medium and long term it can transport green hydrogen and even blue hydrogen”, produced from the methane contained in natural gas.
Pedro Sánchez “has to lead (so) that we are the great European and world gas and hydrogen interconnection, and in this case he has to seek the complicity of the Germans,” commented the head of the Catalan employers’ entity, which also advocates in favor of the gas pipeline with Italy to “complement” the Midcat.
AFP
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