The Midcat is dead… long live the BarMar!

Presidents Sánchez and MacronGettySpain and France will have a new energy interconnection. The political agreement reached this Thursday in Brussels between Pedro Sánchez and Emmanuel Macron, hours before a European summit focused on the energy crisis, definitively buries the Midcat and opens the door to the construction of a new gas pipeline that will connect Barcelona and Marseille through the bed from the Mediterranean. Moncloa estimates that it will be about 360 kilometers long. The pact, which has hardly any data (neither volumes nor budgets nor construction deadlines) solves a problem that has been entrenched for more than a decade. The European Commission did not take an official position but did not hide that it preferred more interconnections. The German Government pressured the French Government to accept that more gas flow from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of the continent to replace part of the Russian gas that stops reaching the center and east of the continent. The Spanish Government uses it to unblock an infrastructure that It will allow, the day it works, for Spain to take advantage of its regasification capacity (approximately equivalent to a third of the European total) to import gas, regasify it and send it to the rest of Europe via Barcelona and Marseille. The two governments and their presidents tried yesterday in Brussels sell it almost as if it were an infrastructure for renewable energy. In addition to reasons of ecological policy, because there will be no European funding if it is dedicated solely to sending gas. There is no green hydrogen technology yet The reality is that, even if it is built with the capacity to transport green hydrogen, this type of energy is still in the of development and nobody is capable of guaranteeing whether there will be commercial production in considerable volumes before 2030, the deadline that must be met for it to receive Community funding. What there is is money in its research and the decisive commitment of the European Commission to develop it. Meanwhile, the BarMar (as they have already begun to call it unofficially) will serve to send gas, a hydrocarbon that is neither green nor renewable nor clean despite the fact that used for electricity generation it emits half that of coal. By taking it off the land and taking it to the seabed, Macron avoids a political problem because the French regions of the Pyrenees view any energy infrastructure with worse and worse eyes. The new infrastructure could be financed in part with European funds from the RePower EU programme. The European Commission already said in September that it was not going to study Midcat because there was no agreement between the governments. He could not impose its construction on France. With this agreement, and grasping that one day it could carry hydrogen, the Community Executive could be part of the financing. When there is enough hydrogen production to send commercially to France, it will still be possible to send gas because community regulations only require that the mix contain a part of renewable energy, not 100%. The pact includes a commitment to strengthen electricity connections between Spain and France . Its current limitation is a bottleneck to increase the exchange of electricity. Right now, due to the crisis in the French nuclear sector (more than half of the reactors are not working, some due to maintenance but more than a dozen because corrosion problems are being inspected), it is Spain that exports electricity to France. Some voices see the whole plan as a mistake. Julio Balana, an expert in energy markets from the General Council of Industrial Engineers, explained to NIUS in September that “it is more efficient to export electricity generated with green hydrogen than to export gas”. Moncloa sources assure that his technical studies say the opposite.