Why doesn’t France say that Scholz pushed the pipeline with Spain?
Scholz proposed a gas pipeline between Portugal, Spain and France, up to central Europe. Madrid likes the idea, trying to push the recovery of MidCat (with European money). Paris, however, is skeptical. Here because
Last week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz proposed the construction of a pipeline from Portugal to Central Europe, passing through Spain and France. “Such a pipeline,” he said , “would massively alleviate the current supply situation”, which is scarce due to the flow-limiting policy pursued by Russia, the largest gas seller to the European Union.
WHAT THE SPANISH MINISTER OF ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION SAID
On Friday, the Spanish Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, said that the pipeline between Spain and France could be operational in less than a year, provided that France and other European countries support the project.
"This new interconnection, this gas pipeline," Ribera told Spanish television TVE, "could come into operation in eight or nine months on the southern side of the border, that is, from the Pyrenees to Spain." As Reuters explains, the Franco-Spanish connection would require the laying of another pipeline segment to join the Spanish and French networks.
THE WORDS OF COSTA (PORTUGAL)
In favor of the infrastructure described by Scholz is Antonio Costa, the Prime Minister of Portugal. According to him, the words of the German Chancellor "strengthen [no] the pressure on the European institutions to unblock this situation once and for all": there is in fact a crisis in gas supplies and prices, which reached the record last Friday. of 245 euros per megawatt hour at the TTF.
Costa also suggested an alternative option to the connection through France: a maritime gas pipeline from Spain to Italy.
THE BARCELONA-LIVORNO GAS PIPELINE
The pipeline project evoked by the Portuguese prime minister exists : it goes from Barcelona to Livorno, is 700 kilometers long, will require an investment of between 2.5 and 3 billion euros and will need one to two years to complete. The conduct with Italy pleases the Spanish government, which however does not want it to be considered an alternative to MidCat, the pipeline between Hostalric (Spain) and Barbaira (France) to which Madrid assigns a strategic value given the possibility of transporting, in future, hydrogen.
SPAIN WANTS YOU TO PAY FOR EUROPE
Spain also insists on another point: that the funds for the construction of the Barcelona-Livorno pipeline should not be taken from its budget, but from that of the European Union or of Italy and the countries of central and northern Europe (according to of Madrid it is they who “will really benefit from it, not us”). Similarly, Pedro Sánchez's government wants Brussels to pay for the pipeline described by Scholz.
LNG AND PIPES
In reality, Spain and Portugal would benefit from the expansion of energy interconnection infrastructures with the rest of Europe: the volumes of liquefied gas arriving at their terminals – and which will be increasing, considering the detachment plans from Russia – they have difficulty being transported to the rest of the continent due to a lack of pipes.
– Read also: All about Bw Lng, which sold a regasification vessel to Snam
As energy analyst Franco Sassi writes , Spain and Portugal together have a regasification capacity of 36.2 billion cubic meters per year. The capacity of the gas pipelines between Spain and France, however, is just 7.5 billion cubic meters.
TIMES AND COSTS OF THE MIDCAT BETWEEN SPAIN AND FRANCE
Enagás, the Spanish company that manages its pipeline network, recently said that the MidCat pipeline project with France could be completed in two and a half years at a cost of € 600-700 million. The project was abandoned in 2019 because it was considered too expensive and impacting on the environment.
FRANCE SAYS NO
The MidCat, as reported by Linkiesta , consists of two sections: the first is the South Transit East Pyrenees, 120 kilometers long and costing 442 million; the second is 1,230 kilometers long (mostly on French territory) and could cost up to 3.1 billion.
Paris would prefer to make smaller investments – for example for LNG terminals in Germany – because, unlike Madrid, it does not see the MidCat as a strategic work. Spain needs it to aspire to become a gas hub at European level, taking advantage of the regasifiers it already owns and that one day it could convert to hydrogen management. France's energy policy, on the other hand, is based on nuclear power : the country already uses this source to produce 70 percent of the energy it consumes, and a few months ago President Emmanuel Macron announced a nearly 52 billion plan to build up to to fourteen next-generation reactors by 2035.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/gasdotto-portogallo-spagna-francia/ on Fri, 26 Aug 2022 07:37:20 +0000.