The Deputy Secretary for Regional and Local Coordination of the PP, Pedro Rollan, considers that the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchez, has been leaving the construction of the gas pipeline to increase supply from Spain and Portugal in “the background” during his mandate, and has supported the proposal of the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to promote this project.
In an interview on TVE, collected by Europa Press, the leader of the PP has pointed out that the construction of this structure is “absolutely necessary” and has celebrated that, “although late”, the recovery of the infrastructure will be reinvigorated.
However, it has also made it ugly that the Sanchez government has not had “neither the momentum nor the necessary demands” to complete the almost 250 kilometers of gas pipeline that remain to be executed.
Likewise, Rollan stressed that the gas pipeline will mark “a before and after” in the “independence and autonomy” of Europe and Spain with respect to Russian gas, so he hopes that this new commitment on the part of the German Government will be “the final push”.
At the same time, the leader of the PP has valued the “regasification power” that Spain is in the European sphere and the benefits that our country implies as a “gateway” to energy raw materials. “We have many specific companies in this very complicated area, which serve as an employment opportunity,” he added.
The German leader explained that, if the connections with the Iberian Peninsula had been strengthened earlier, it would have been “a massive contribution to alleviate and lighten the situation” of the gas supply that Germany has received basically from Russia in recent years.
For this reason, Scholz has defended “firmly” in a press conference addressing a project that will deal with other leaders of Spain, Portugal and France and that he also plans to expose before the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.
The MidCat project has been paralyzed for years due to its high costs and the low price of Russian supplies. There are still 226 kilometers of pipes to be built from the Catalan town of Hostalric to the French town of Barbaira, and Spain is asking the EU to cover the costs.
At present, only two gas pipelines pass from Spanish soil to the other side of the Pyrenees and add up to a capacity of barely 8,000 million cubic meters per year, when the ‘Nord Stream 2’, the failed project proposed to export gas from Russia to Germany, it can carry about 55,000 million cubic meters.
