Madrid dreams in “hub” for the entrance, storage and distribution of gas in Europe, thanks to its gas pipeline connected to Algeria and 30% of the regasification capabilities of Europe. But the country, separated from the rest of the continent by the Pyrenees Barrier, lack of interconnections with France.
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While Europe seeks to reduce its reliance on Russian gas, Spain intends to position itself as a strategic “hub” to diversify the sources of supply of the continent. “We can be an alternative to Russian gas,” he insisted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, early in February, even before the invasion in Ukraine. The idea since then made its way. “With its great energy capacity and experience in renewable energies, Spain can and will play an important role in providing Europe, finally confirmed the president of the European Commissioner, Ursula von der Leyen, visiting Madrid On March 5th. And, for that, we must work in the interconnections between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European Union. “”
On the table, a folder that we thought definitively buried was resurrected: the Midcat. Launched by Spain, Portugal and France in 2003, this pipeline project crossing the Pyrenees between Catalonia and the south-west of the hexagon had to connect the Spanish and Portuguese networks to the European network and help disenclusing the Iberian Peninsula, a true “energy island”, which has less than 5% of interconnections – far from the 15% requested by Europe.
With an estimated cost of 400 million euros in its first phase of development, the infrastructure had even figured, a time, among the priority infrastructures of the EU, before being abandoned in 2019, on the back of Events of environmental opponents.
“Do not have the Midcat has been a strategic error, regrets the former Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2016, José Manuel Garcia-Margallo. With his other pipelines and regasification factories, Spain would have could allow a true alternative to Russian gas. “But a study commissioned by the European Commission believed that the gas pipeline would not be profitable or necessary. In July 2018, Emmanuel Macron had recognized at a meeting in Lisbon that he had not been convinced of the utility “gas interconnections. In the absence of consensus on the distribution of costs, but, above all, of the French side interest, the project was finally buried in 2019 by the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE). Which questioned the profit-cost relationship of infrastructure and its strategic interest …
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