LISBON (Reuters) – Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa is urging France to give the green light to the relaunch of MidCat, the gas pipeline project between France and Spain, stressing that the infrastructure would help central and eastern Europe to do without Russian gas imports.
Madrid and Lisbon have seven LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminals which could supply central Europe via gas pipelines such as the trans-Pyrenees project between Spain and France, which the latter considers unnecessary and harmful to the environment
“I hope that France will understand that it is no longer possible to block this project. I hope it will happen as soon as possible,” Antonio Costa told television channels TVI and CNN Portugal on Monday evening.
French President Emmanuel Macron justified his opposition to the project last week by explaining that the current flows between France and Spain were not saturated and that they were mainly going to the Iberian Peninsula, and not the other way around.
Portugal’s prime minister said he understood France’s position, which is seeking to protect its ailing nuclear sector, but warned that central and eastern European countries urgently needed to diversify their energy sources.
“Today, with the energy crisis in Europe, there cannot be this competition between types of energy,” he said.
Launched in 2013, the MidCat project, which was to connect a city north of Barcelona to Barbaira, in Aude, was suspended in 2019, deemed too expensive and damaging to the environment.
However, Spain, Portugal and more recently Germany have argued that the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine has shown that such a pipeline is necessary.
(Report Sergio Goncalves; French version Diana Mandiá, edited by Sophie Louet)
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