Ribera denies in Parliament the gas pipeline that Sánchez demands from Macron

• Sánchez urges the European Commission to present a "balanced formula" that guarantees energy and lowers its price

• Economy Ribera irritates the French Government by blaming it for the delay of the gas pipeline: "He has not told us about this since 2019"

One of the battles that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, is attempting on his tour to improve energy autonomy in

and enhance the role of

, such as the improvement of gas interconnections, is "unnecessary", according to a paradoxical document from the

dated ten days after the Russian invasion.

It is about the construction of a new gas pipeline in the Pyrenees that Sánchez demanded on Monday from the President of the

, Emmanuel Macron, and defended on March 5 before the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

However, the third vice president denies the project in a written response dated March 7, 48 hours after she herself participated in the meeting in Moncloa with Von der Leyen.

To the question of the PP parliamentary spokesmen on energy,

and

-among other deputies of the party-, about the lack of defense by the Government of a gas pipeline that, in their opinion, is of European interest The government response is resounding.

He points out that the

aims to lead Spain to be "a carbon neutral country in the year 2050" and "in order to achieve these objectives, the PNIEC contemplates, among others, new investments in electrical interconnections with France and

;

but new international natural gas connections are considered unnecessary.”

Why unnecessary?

In the first place, according to the Ministry of Teresa Ribera, because gas is no longer of interest.

"The Plan places the share of natural gas in primary energy in 2030 below the levels existing in 2020 and the available capacity of the built facilities."

The six regasification plants had an average use of 32% in 2020 -the year of the pandemic-, argues the ministry.

However, its potential is enormous, according to the European Commission and Sánchez, because it represents more than 40% of the EU's regasification capacity.

Also the

points out in its latest report that if the new gas pipeline is not built there is a bottleneck that prevents the rest of the EU from taking advantage of that capacity in Spain and gas from Algeria as an alternative to Russian.

The current tension with Algeria over the Sahara issue forces the government to push further for this gas pipeline to try to attract the interest of the large North African gas supplier.

The PP blames Ribera for the fact that the EU reduced interest in the project in 2019

Ribera, in another wave, clings, in any case, to the fact that the European Commission itself rejected the project after the resolution of the

on June 20, 2019. This was based in turn on the negative reports of the regulators from France and Spain, who did not consider the investment of 471 million euros in the first phase of the project called

(STEP) to be profitable.

Sources from the

(CNMC) who participated in the decision clarify that that report must be seen in the context of the time, which is very different from the current one of Russian aggression.

However, with the Russian Army bombing that same morning of March 7 the north of

, the Government's response to the PP deputies ends with "it is concluded that the current gas infrastructures are, in general, sufficient".

Thus, he ratified a response from the same ministry last January already published by this newspaper along the same lines of congratulating himself on the fact that the EU excludes new gas pipelines with France and Portugal from projects of common interest.

In statements to this newspaper, the aforementioned PP parliamentary spokesman, Juan Diego Requena, attributes that exclusion to Ribera: «The interconnection with France was a project financed with European funds, profitable and viable and only a few months later, with the arrival of Ribera to the Government, ceased to be so, I hold Teresa Ribera responsible for this.

It has been a waste of time and a tremendous strategic blindness of the vice president who today instead of giving us a plus as a country against Russian gas, brings us the consequences that we know: rise in prices and irrelevance ».

A week later, Ribera sent an unusual letter to the Ciudadanos MEPs,

and

, as if he wanted to qualify the previous one to those of the PP.

In it, he reaffirmed his interest in electricity interconnections and, regarding gas, he opened up to "assess with our European partners the suitability of increasing our gas interconnection capacity, taking into account both the current geopolitical context and the decarbonization and neutrality horizon set by the EU".

In any case, always without Sánchez's bluntness, which he declared on the 14th in

that "Europe must gain energy autonomy, as Spain is also proposing with interconnections that allow, for example, the gas capacity that Spain has to offset

's dependence on

."

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• Ursula von der Leyen

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• Occidental Sahara

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• Theresa Rivera

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• Yolanda Diaz

• Emmanuel Macron

• Pedro Sanchez

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