A cost-benefit analysis of the Franco-Spanish MidCat gas pipeline, which was commissioned by the European Commission and leaked to the press on Wednesday 18 April, questions the financial viability of this project, with an anticipated cost of €3 billion and which has already received Community support of €5.6 million as an infrastructure project of common interest, or PCI (see EUROPE 11526).
The study, which was carried out by the Finnish consultancy Pöyry for the Commission, which is accused of burying it, shows that this 230 km-long gas pipeline, to connect Catalonia in Spain to Languedoc in France to double the quantity of gas that can be sent via the Pyrenees from North Africa on the one hand and Norway and Russia on the other by 2022, will not be economically viable in most scenarios. Furthermore, the infrastructure will lead to an increase in gas prices and environmental impact.
According to the study, the pipeline will waste taxpayers' money, lead to higher prices for consumers, do nothing to increase energy security and will be hardly used, said the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth.
The Commissioner for Energy and the Climate, Miguel Arias Cañete, who has fully backed this dubious pipeline and a hundred other priority projects, should cross them all off the list of PCIs and invest in a safer and cleaner Europe, without fossil energies, it adds.
When approached by EUROPE on Friday 20 April, the Commission declined to comment.
The project is inconsistent with the EU's climate commitments and promises to reduce dependency on fossil energies, said French MEP Michèle Rivasi (Greens/EFA), whom the Commission denied access to the document. MidCat makes no economic sense, it is based on private interests, not the public interest or objective evidence, added her Spanish colleague Xabier Benito Ziluaga (GUE/NGL).
In a letter sent this week to the French President, Emmanuel Macron, Rivasi, Benito Ziluaga and some ten other French and Spanish MEPs of the Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL groups called for the gas pipeline project to be halted, criticising its exorbitant and opaque costs and disastrous environmental impact, which runs counter to the commitments made at COP21. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)