While Europe seeks to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, Spain intends to position itself as a strategic “hub” to diversify the continent’s supply sources. “We can be an alternative to Russian gas”, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted in early February, even before the invasion of Ukraine. The idea has since made its way. “With its great energy capacity and its great experience in renewable energies, Spain can and will play an important role in supplying Europe, finally confirmed the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, visiting Madrid on March 5. And, for this, we must work in the interconnections between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European Union [UE]. »
On the table, a file that we thought was definitely buried was resurrected: the MidCat. Launched by Spain, Portugal and France in 2003, this gas pipeline project crossing the Pyrenees between Catalonia and the south-west of France was intended to connect the Spanish and Portuguese networks to the European network and help open up the the Iberian Peninsula, a veritable “energy island”, which has less than 5% interconnections – far from the 15% required by Europe.
“Failing to complete the MidCat was a strategic mistake”, José Manuel Garcia-Margallo, former Spanish Foreign Minister
With an estimated cost of 400 million euros in its first phase of development, the infrastructure had even figured, for a time, among the priority infrastructures of the EU, before being abandoned in 2019, against the backdrop of demonstrations of environmental opponents.
“Failing to complete the MidCat was a strategic mistake, regrets the former Spanish foreign minister from 2011 to 2016, José Manuel Garcia-Margallo. With its other gas pipelines and regasification plants, Spain could have provided a real alternative to Russian gas. » But a study commissioned by the European Commission estimated that the pipeline would be neither profitable nor necessary. In July 2018, Emmanuel Macron acknowledged, during a meeting in Lisbon, that he “was not convinced of the usefulness” gas interconnections. For lack of consensus on the distribution of costs, but, above all, of interest on the French side, the project was finally buried, in 2019, by the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE). Which called into question the benefit-cost relationship of infrastructure and its strategic interest…
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