Emmanuel Macron's meeting with Pedro Sánchez and António Costa, to be held this Thursday in Brussels, will not serve to carry out the Midcat gas pipeline. Elysée sources made it very clear yesterday that the French position "is constant and has not changed." "For us, the project does not present economic or environmental viability", insisted from the French presidency.
Macron's appointment with the Spanish president and the Portuguese prime minister, prior to the European Council, will be dedicated to talking, above all, about electrical interconnections with the Iberian Peninsula and the future possibility of extending them to the supply of hydrogen, although all in a political and not technical framework.
Paris admits that it is necessary to reflect on "the new energy landscape" after the war in Ukraine and the need to increase European "energy sovereignty", although Midcat does not enter the equation. According to the French vision, the extension of this gas pipeline to the north of the Pyrenees would never be a short-term project that would ensure supplies for this winter or next, but "with a perspective of 5 or 6 years", so, in the current situation, "it would not contribute anything to the energy security of France or the Iberian Peninsula or Europe in the very short term".
Paris has been saying actively and passively that the permanent infrastructures for gas collide with the objective of dispensing with hydrocarbons.
