PRAGUE (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday he would meet Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa next week over the MidCat trans-Pyrenees gas pipeline project.
Madrid and Lisbon are trying to lift Paris’s reservations with a view to relaunching this project in the face of the energy crisis in Europe linked to the conflict in Ukraine.
Launched in 2013, the MidCat project (Midi-Catalonia), which was to link a city north of Barcelona to Barbaira, in Aude, was suspended in 2019, deemed too expensive and harmful to the environment, but Madrid and Berlin have not given up on its construction.
“The goal we must pursue, and I say it here very clearly, is to go to the end of the opening up of the Iberian Peninsula in terms of gas, hydrogen and electricity”, declared Emmanuel Macron during of a press conference following the European summit in Prague.
“We all need to think carefully about whether making a gas pipeline in spaces that are protected is the best way to do it,” he added.
(Written by Nicolas Delame and Sophie Louet, edited by Matthieu Protard)
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