In addition to the agonizing crisis of the Popular Party, other things are happening in this country that should be paid attention to. For example, yesterday the European Commissioner for Energy traveled to Madrid, Kadri Simsonof Estonian nationality, with the aim of exchanging views with the Government on the contingency plans for a possible energy crisis in Europe as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, which is going from bad to worse.
While Mrs. Simson was speaking with the Spanish authorities, the Russian president Vladimir Putin signed the recognition of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. That recognition will be accompanied by the dispatch of Russian troops to those territories. The European Union meets today to decide on the imposition of sanctions on Russia. The great international crisis that everyone feared has begun. Let’s see who stops that gear.
© Llibert Teixidó
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The European Commissioner for Energy travels to Spain to talk about emergency plans
Commissioner Simson traveled to Madrid with a dossier on the capacity of the different European countries to receive and store liquefied gas by sea and transfer it to their neighbors in the event that Russia totally or partially cut off gas shipments to Europe. Germany, whose dependence on Russian gas reaches 60%, and Italy, with a servitude of 40%, would be the two largest economies in the European Union affected. A supply crisis from the East, however, would reverberate across the continent. For this reason, alternatives have been sought for weeks, which go through a greater collection of liquefied gas (LNG) in the regasification plants of the continent, which are not many.
Spain is the European country with the largest storage and regasification capacity. The Iberian Peninsula has eight plants for capturing LNG, seven in Spain and one in Portugal. Three of them are in the Mediterranean arc: ports of Barcelona, Sagunto and Cartagena. Spain, as is known, barely depends on Russian gas, but it is obliged to carefully care for relations with Algeria, a supplier country, via gas pipeline, of 47% of the gas consumed last year. With eight regasification plants on the Iberian coast and a pipeline connection with Algeria, Spain would now be the star of the contingency plans if it had better cross-border connections. To sum it up: Spain can stockpile gas but needs more pipe to send it to the Germans.
That was yesterday one of the issues addressed in Madrid by Commissioner Simson, since there is already a European dossier on storage capacities and the current state of cross-border connections.
This dossier was discussed fifteen days ago in Washington at the meeting of the European Union-United States Energy Council, co-chaired by the US Secretary of State Antony Blink and the high representative of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell. The technical meetings are incessant since then. President Pedro Sanchez and the German chancellor Olaf Scholz have discussed this issue in recent weeks. Germany is very interested in the Iberian platform, not only for the current contingency plans. The gas pipelines will also be able to transport green hydrogen in the future, the great German strategic bet to depend less on Russia.
In this context, the first opposition party in Spain has decided to implode. gaslight.