Barely a month has lasted peace between France and Spain. Only 30 days after both countries signed their friendship treaty in Barcelona, the confrontation between the two countries has broken out. The spark was a phrase: "I don't like some ways of expressing yourself." Teresa Ribera said it last Tuesday at the exit of a forum in the energy sector.
The French ambassador in Spain, Jean-Michel Casa, reacted by publishing a tweet through the official account of the French embassy in Spain that started: "We also do not like the ways of expressing the third vice president of the Government and minister for the Ecological Transition...”. In the tweet, he was "surprised" by the way in which Teresa Ribera had criticized the position of the European Commission in favor of hydrogen produced with nuclear energy, called pink, being treated as green hydrogen (which is produced with renewable energies ). "You cannot qualify as renewable what is not", the vice president had assured to make clear the position of Spain regarding the support of the European Commission for the French position.
The ambassador's tweet was deleted yesterday Friday afternoon. But the tension was already at its highest. With the tweet, France has intensified the campaign to convince as many countries as possible to position themselves in favor of pink hydrogen, that produced with nuclear energy, being considered green. The countries have two months to make that decision, which is key for France. If your hydrogen is considered green, you can export it to a Germany in need of alternative energy to the severed Russian gas.
If it is not, Spain would have a clear field to be able to export its hydrogen, undoubtedly green, to all of Central Europe through a tube that not only crosses French territory, but also diminishes the future benefits of Paris's renewed commitment to nuclear, since it will build 14 new reactors.
So France has put at stake what hurts Spain the most, the future viability of the hydrogen pipeline, named H2Med, which will connect Barcelona with Marseille after an investment of 2,500 million euros.
The strategy is not new. France has spent years stopping energy connections with Spain that barely reach 3%, when Europe demanded a minimum of 10% by 2020. The difference now is that Germany needs this energy while defending renewables and reviling nuclear and can tip the balance. Last year nuclear and gas were declared clean energy in the European taxonomy, but at that time Paris and Berlin had a common interest, one for nuclear and the other for gas.
Spain is not opposed to French pink hydrogen being regulated. “It seems reasonable to us that it has a space in the hydrogen directive and in the gas directive. But what we will not admit is that it is equated with renewable energy. It is not," said Ribera. What is happening, according to ministry sources, is that the EU is debating various energy regulations: the renewables directive, the hydrogen gas directive... and each one carries out its own negotiations that "should not contaminate the development of the H2Med green corridor project. Hydrogen produced by nuclear power is not renewable. They can share infrastructure but not name ”, insists the Spanish side.
