Ribera defends that the debate on MidCat is still open despite the position of Brussels and Macron

MADRID, 6 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, has defended that the debate on MidCat, the gas pipeline between Spain and France through the Pyrenees, is still "open", despite the fact that the European Commission has avoided this Tuesday to support the project and that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has rejected it.

"I think it is important to understand what the (European) Commission has said and what it has not said. What it has said is that it is a project that is not on the list of projects of community interest. Because it is true that this list, which is updated with certain periodicity, is prior to the debate that has arisen at this moment in the European context", the minister asserted at the press conference after the Council of Ministers on Tuesday.

However, he stressed that the MidCat does appear in the annex of important infrastructures of the RepowerEu plan, which "the heads of State and Government adopted at the proposal of the European Commission before the summer", recalled the head of Ecological Transition .

In Brussels, the spokesman for Energy of the Community Executive, Tim McPhie, asserted that the European Commission could not give a "specific position" at this time about the project given that "it is necessary for the Member States and the promoters to advance in the analysis on the possibilities of viability" of the same.

In this sense, Ribera has emphasized that "it is logical" that when there is a coincidence of interests between the countries (which does not happen in this case) through whose territory this type of infrastructure passes, it is "simple" that they can advance.

However, he has also defended the need to propose this type of infrastructure at an "exceptional" time and has also argued that Spain's approach to the gas pipeline is that it can also be used in the future to transport green hydrogen.