France changes its position and will negotiate the long-term viability of the MidCat

Paris claims to have never broken off dialogue and calls for a technical analysis to complete the pipeline. It agrees to maintain the discussions, but will not launch it soon, as requested by the government of Spain.

New twist in the discussion between France and Spain over the execution of the MidCat gas pipeline. From Paris they accept to maintain discussions on the project and assure that they have never broken the dialogue, although they insist that the gas pipeline will not serve to face the energy crisis. In return, it will request that the relevance of the project be determined by a technical analysis.

“The discussion and dialogue are not broken, on the contrary,” Elysee sources stressed on Wednesday in relation to the Midcat, after French President Emmanuel Macron stressed at the beginning of the month that there is no need for new gas interconnections between Spain and France because the current ones are far from saturation.

The sources said that “the relevance of this interconnection” is being studied from the technical point of view, but it is not a short-term solution and it remains to be seen if it responds to future needs. “The French and Franco-Spanish reflection has never been broken,” they insisted, but we must see what will be needed in the future. The MidCat project was shelved in 2019 because the network operators of the two countries concluded that the investment was not justified in the face of the profitability that could be obtained.

Spain has tried to relaunch it in recent months, in the heat of the energy crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the need to supply the European market with alternative sources as Moscow has turned off the tap. The proposal of the third vice president, Teresa Ribera, has the support in particular of Germany and Portugal, who welcome the conversion of Spain into a new gas hub that takes advantage of the regasification capacity of the six Spanish plants.

However, France insists that the infrastructures to get gas from Spain to central European countries such as Germany would take many years to be built, would cost billions of euros and that does not seem to make sense when what is wanted is to be able to do without hydrocarbons by mid-century. Macron intervened on September 5 to insist on his position, saying that the two gas pipelines now between Spain and France have been used at just over 50% of their capacity since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in February.

Macron was then in favor of increasing electricity interconnections with Spain, which France is using a lot in recent months to import current given that more than half of its nuclear power plants are currently stopped by infrastructure problems.

The MidCat is not on the agenda of the Euro-Mediterranean summit to be held soon in Alicante, where the Heads of State and/or Government of the nine participating countries must first deal with the energy crisis. According to the Elysée, the gas and electricity networks “are part” of the problem that leaders in Alicante must deal with “from the point of view of efficiency and European solidarity”.

Source: La Información