France will reassess the possibility of a gas pipeline project in the Pyrenees, in response to the request of “friendly” countries such as Spain and Germany, said French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire. “Since the request of the President of the Spanish Government and the German Chancellor, when friends request it, we analyze the request of our friends, of our partners,” said Bruno Le Maire, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE. The reaction comes after the leaders of the Governments of Germany, Olaf Scholz, and Spain, Pedro Sánchez, once again insisted on the need to advance in the connections for energy transport between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe and, specifically, with the projected gas pipeline to the Pyrenees.
“Spain and Germany are very close allies of France, so when they make a proposal, we examine it,” the French minister said, responding to questions from journalists in Paris. Bruno de La Maire recalled that the new Pyrenees gas pipeline project “is a very old issue”.
The project of this connection for the transport of gas and, in the future, of hydrogen is already decades old, but it was definitively abandoned in 2019, due to French resistance related to environmental issues, to which other economic viability was added, given the low Russian gas prices at the time. But with the gas crisis in Russia, the German chancellor once again put the issue at the top of the European agenda (Portugal and Spain have always defended it).
Two weeks ago, the French Ministry of Energy Transition admitted to having reservations about the resumption of the project, recently considered a priority by the European Union (EU), in the context of the dependence of several Central European countries on Russian gas and Moscow’s threat of cut off the supply.
The irreducible French opposition. France opposes the pipeline in the Pyrenees
Olaf Scholz defended this Tuesday that it is necessary to advance in the “great task” of building and reinforcing the European network of energy connections, both for electricity and hydrogen, in the future, but also for gas, to make the EU less dependent on Russia. Germany will do “everything possible” to launch projects related to European energy interconnections and make better use of the capacities and possibilities of Portugal and Spain in this matter, said Olaf Scholz, at a joint press conference with Pedro Sánchez, who today been invited to participate in a meeting of the German Council of Ministers in Meseberg, near Berlin.
Pedro Sánchez, for his part, reiterated that Portugal and Spain have been asking for years to streamline connections for energy transport between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe and that if the Pyrenees gas pipeline project “does not develop at the right pace” , due to the obstacles raised by France, the EU itself defined “another possibility”, which is that of a link with Italy.
The Iberian Peninsula, due to the lack of connections to transport energy to the rest of Europe, functions as an “energy island” and both Portugal and Spain made investments in this area that created infrastructure that could now be used to supply other European countries.
Scholz invited Sánchez to be in a Council of Ministers of the German Government after having publicly defended on the 11th of this month the construction of a pan-European gas pipeline, which would link the Iberian Peninsula, from Portugal, to Germany.
The Secretary of State for European Affairs of Portugal, Tiago Antunes, also defended today that the “concretion of energy interconnections between Portugal, Spain and the rest of Europe” is “an almost obvious thing in the current geopolitical context”. “This idea is making its way. We believe that this is the time. This is the ideal context to meet once and for all this important need that Portugal has been defending at a European level”, he said.
Tiago Antunes defended that the Iberian Peninsula “has to stop being an energy island” in the European context and that Portugal has “an enormous potential for the production of renewable gases, in particular green hydrogen”, which it can “export to the rest of Europe ”. ”.
Despite acknowledging that “it has been difficult to implement this idea”, the Secretary of State stressed that the energy connection through Portugal has “increasingly more supporters”, citing as an example the statements of Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz, who advocated the construction of the gas pipeline to reduce dependence on Russian gas.
Source: Observadora
