The LNG ports in Spain could play an important role in Europe’s gas supply security in the future.
Foto: Alamy Stock
Spain would like to play a central role in restructuring the gas supply in the EU in the wake of the Ukraine war. The Catalan daily newspaper La Vanguardia reported a month ago that Madrid and NATO were considering reactivating the MidCat project. It was put on hold in 2019. The newspaper reported that the planned pipeline could reduce the “heavy dependence” on Russian gas by pumping gas from Algeria and liquid gas from terminals in Spain and Portugal “into the heart of Europe”.
Even before the start of the Ukraine war, unnamed sources in the Spanish government were quoted, according to which the revival of a “new cross-border connection with France” was now “on the NATO table”. The social-democratic government in Madrid is still officially reluctant to comment on the plan. The problem for Pedro Sánchez’s government is that it was they who pushed for stopping the project for the time being in 2019.
In Catalonia, where there was also strong resistance from environmentalists against MidCat, the large business association “Foment del Treball” is now pushing for reactivation. In a letter to Sánchez, he has just called for the “urgent” continuation of the project in order to position itself as a “gas hub” in southern Europe. “Being less dependent on supplies from Russia is a geostrategic and economic priority and a weapon to stop Russian expansionism,” said association president Josep Sánchez Llibre, recalling that the project was agreed in 2013 between France, Spain and Portugal .
The tube from Barcelona, where the largest regasification plant in Europe is located in the port, has even been laid as far as Hostalric on the edge of the Pyrenees. The pipeline was to run a total of 235 kilometers to Barbaira in France. But the section called “South Transit Eastern Pyrenees” (Step) was denied permission. Officially, this was justified by a lack of necessity and high costs for a project that the EU had until 2018 on the list of “priority infrastructure” in Brussels. The pipeline “does not meet market needs” and is “not mature enough to be considered,” energy regulators in Spain and France argued when it was shelved in 2019. The cost argument from the French side is even justified, because France should raise two-thirds of the 3.1 billion euros that had been estimated for it. Spain should be the main beneficiary.
So it was also a political decision in Madrid in the dispute with the renegade Catalans not to invest in the region. It was a decision against their own interests in the country. The Social Democratic Environment Minister Teresa Ribera also put forward climate protection arguments against it. However, according to proponents, the blockade now poses a problem for the security of supply in Europe, because MidCat should actually have gone into operation this year. Completion before 2024 or 2025 is no longer an option.
However, the pipeline could only modestly reduce energy dependency on Russia at best. With a capacity of a good seven billion cubic meters per year, the aim is to double the amount of gas that has been fed into the French grid from the Iberian Peninsula in two pipelines via the Basque Country. But that would still only be a fraction of the capacity that Nord Stream 2 should deliver with 55 billion cubic meters and that Nord Stream 1 has.
There is also the question of where the gas that is to flow to Central Europe via MidCat is to come from. At the moment, even Spain is no longer receiving enough gas from Algeria. Algeria stopped supplying gas to the neighboring country after contracts expired because of the war in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. For this reason, Morocco repeatedly accuses Algeria of being a »partisan at war« and of supporting the Polisario liberation front in Western Sahara.
Since no more gas flows to the neighbors, no more gas is currently reaching Spain and Portugal via the Maghreb-Europe pipeline. The direct Medgaz pipeline cannot compensate for the failure, which is why Spain is also increasingly relying on liquefied gas ship deliveries.
Access to the Spanish and Portuguese liquid gas terminals, which the German Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) is now banking on, should also be improved via MidCat. The liquefied gas produced by the world’s largest gas producer, the USA, using the fracking method, is particularly harmful to the climate – according to experts even more harmful than coal. So far, there are regasification plants in Spain and Portugal, and thus about 30 percent of the total capacity in the EU.