Abandonment of the Midcat gas pipeline: Paris, Madrid and Lisbon agree on an alternative

Published on: 2022/10/20 – 18:14 An agreement was reached on Thursday between France, Spain and Portugal to replace the MidCat gas pipeline project with a 190 kilometer undersea pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille. This is a step forward for an infrastructure project that has been stalled for many years. France, Spain and Portugal announced on Thursday October 20 that they had reached an agreement to replace the MidCat project with an undersea pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille, intended to transport gas and then green hydrogen. Initially launched in 2003 , the MidCat project (short for Midi-Catalonia) aimed to link the French and Spanish gas networks via a 190-kilometre pipeline from Hostalric, north of Barcelona, ​​to Barbaira, east of Carcassonne, passing through the Pyrenees.”We have agreed to replace the MidCat project with a new project, which will be called the Green Energy Corridor, to connect the Iberian Peninsula to France and therefore to the European energy market between Barcelona and Marseille” , explained the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sanchez, on his arrival in Brussels for a European summit devoted to the energy crisis. Green hydrogen above all “It is a question of creating a pipeline for green hydrogen but also of transitory way e for gas, which the European energy market needs”, he specified. To finalize the agreement, Pedro Sanchez, French President Emmanuel Macron and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa must meet on 8 and December 9 in Alicante in Spain.Madrid and Lisbon, with the support of Berlin, had been trying for weeks to lift Paris’ reservations on MidCat with a view to relaunching energy interconnections in the face of the crisis in Europe linked to the conflict in Ukraine. The gas pipeline was to allow Spain, which has a third of Europe’s LNG (liquefied natural gas) regasification capacity, to export gas, which came by boat from the United States or Qatar, to the rest of Europe. ‘Europe. The gas infrastructures linking France and Spain. © FMM graphic studio A project abandoned for its environmental impactThis project – abandoned in 2019 due to its environmental impact and an economic interest then considered limited – was also intended to allow in the longer term to transport green hydrogen, energy of the future produced thanks to renewable energies, of which Spain wants to be one of the champions. The project ran into opposition from Paris. Upon his arrival at the European summit, Emmanuel Macron announced “the abandonment of the historic MidCat project (…) to promote a project that we will be working on in the coming weeks in a very intense way with three people”. The French president specifies that ” the objective is to work on the intensification of our electrical interconnections and the densification of these, and to work on a hydrogen and renewable energy interconnection between Barcelona and Marseille”. Adding that the project should benefit from European funding, he concluded : “the objective of being better connected to the rest of the continent through Spain and Portugal is thus raised, and then the objective which was ours, to continue our strategy of climate and energy transition, corresponds to this new project “.With AFP and Reuters