In order to develop new sources of energy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) wants to support the construction of a pipeline from Portugal and Spain via France to Central Europe. Such a line should have been built and is now missing, said Scholz on Thursday at his summer press conference in Berlin.
This would now make “a massive contribution to relieving and easing the supply situation”. That is why he “very much campaigned for us to tackle such a project” with his colleagues in Spain, Portugal and France as well as with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The MidCat project for a gas pipeline from Spain to southern France was stopped a few years ago because it was considered uneconomical at the time, also because of the cheaper natural gas from Russia. In view of the Russian war against Ukraine, however, the pipeline could now help to make Europe less dependent on Russian gas. There are still 226 kilometers to go from Catalonia via the Pyrenees to France, construction time at least two years. Spain wants the EU to finance the construction.
So far there are only two smaller gas pipelines northbound from Spain across the Pyrenees, with a combined capacity of 8 billion cubic meters per year. For comparison: Nord Stream 2, which was stopped because of the war, has a capacity of at least 55 billion cubic meters.
Scholz disagreed with the conclusion that the construction of pipelines would increase the consumption of fossil fuels. That is a “mistake”. In the future, terminals and pipelines created for the import of liquefied natural gas (LNG) could be used to import hydrogen. In the future, hydrogen will be an important raw material for industry and should be produced on a large scale in Germany. For the corresponding process – the so-called electrolysis – a boom is necessary. This requires electricity.
“We don’t have that much time, because we want to be CO2-neutral by 2045,” said the Chancellor. That means only emitting as many greenhouse gases as can be bound again. This is why electricity is important. Currently 600 terawatt hours are needed, by the end of the decade it will be 800 and by the end of the decade after next probably around 16,000 terawatt hours so that industry can operate in a CO2-neutral manner. For this to happen, renewable energies would have to be expanded further.
Spain’s largest gas supplier is Algeria. As a result of diplomatic disputes between Madrid and Algiers, the North African country’s share of Spanish gas imports fell within a year from almost 50 percent to 29 percent for the period between August 2021 and July 2022. In return, imports from the USA have recently been good 28 percent more important.
It was followed by Nigeria with 14 and Russia with 9 percent. Spain primarily imports LPG. The country has six LNG terminals, which convert liquefied petroleum gas into natural gas. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently emphasized that his country could export gas to the EU.
