The president of the parliamentary group of En Comú Podem, Jéssica Albiach, has traveled to Brussels to hold various meetings at the headquarters of the European Commission, from where she has launched a clear demand to the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès: to “stop” the infamous Midcat project, the gas pipeline between Spain and France that was left half-built years ago and that is now planned to be completed to reduce energy dependence on Russia.
Albiach has criticized the president’s willingness to recover this work as a result of the war in Ukraine, which would allow gas to be supplied to European countries that are forced to reduce energy dependence on Russia as a result of the conflict. And he has argued environmental issues: “The future is to be more of a Silicon Valley of renewables than to be the sewage system for Europe’s fossil fuels with a new gas pipeline,” Albiach pointed out.
The leader has recalled that Midcat was already a “buried project” because “it was bad business for Europe and for Catalonia”, however, Aragonès seems to have made a strong commitment to it.
Last April, the president defended this infrastructure in Paris, after meeting with the French renewable energy employers Syndicat des Énergies Renouvelables, as “one of the projects that we believe may be most interesting to finally provide a network of gas pipelines for the whole of European geography. In fact, Aragonès argued that “the more alternative energy sources there are, the less dependency there will be on certain producers,” he said, referring to Russia.
But Albiach and the commons despise this project, as they have been doing with others that the Government has tried to promote (the expansion of El Prat airport, the 2030 Winter Olympics, the Salou leisure complex, etc.). For the leader, it makes no sense for Catalonia and the State to make a commitment now to fossil fuels, instead of doing so to green energies.
In addition, as Albiach has pointed out, the funds to pay for this infrastructure are taken from funds that Europe wanted to allocate to the ecological transition, for which he considers that starting it “would not only go against the ecological transition, but it would be a scam” .
“We are facing a failed macro-project of the government of the Generalitat and we ask the Aragonese president to leave Midcat and promote renewable energies once and for all because Catalonia has been a desert in renewables in the last decade”, he underlined.
Albiach has even refuted the possibilities that this gas pipeline could serve to transport green hydrogen, as had been proposed. “It is a lie that the Midcat can transport green hydrogen in the medium term” because the tubes installed in France “are not suitable for transporting that green hydrogen”, he assured, and they could only transport 10% of it.
In turn, the commons MEP Ernest Urtasun has celebrated that the European Parliament has taken the first step to knock down the European Commission’s proposal to consider some investments in nuclear and gas as sustainable. “It would leave us tied to fossil fuels for another 10 years, something we can’t afford,” he has said.
