The European Commission avoided taking a position yesterday on the construction of the Midcat pipeline after French President Emmanuel Macron rejected that it could that it could alleviate the energy crisis Europe is experiencing. "Any additional cross-border infrastructure project connecting the Iberian peninsula with the rest of Europe has to be analysed by the member states involved and the promoter", the Energy spokesman of the community executive, Tim McPhie, said.

The European Union has long included in its energy roadmap an increase interconnections between different states. For Brussels, this is the only way to create a single market, since without exchanges –or the very meagre existing ones– each of the markets operates in isolation. In fact, it is this lack of interconnections that allows Spain and Portugal to limit the price of gas, since the EU authorities have accepted the so-called Iberian exception and consider the Iberian Peninsula to be an energy island.

In France, there is still uncertainty around the MidCat gas pipeline, which would connect Catalonia with France over the Pyrenees. Despite the optimism from the Spanish government, Emmanuel Macron's ministers still see the infrastructure as a distant project. "[The MidCat] would take many years to come into operation and, therefore, would not provide an answer to the current crisis," the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, headed by Agnès Pannier-Runacher, tells ARA via email.

The war in Ukraine has altered many government plans, in particular, those concerned with energy. The fact that Russia, until now the European Union's main gas supplier, is using gas supplies to threaten the EU has caused politicians and institutions to look at projects that had been previously shelved. This is the case of the MidCat gas pipeline, ultimately cancelled in 2019, which was to connect Catalonia and France through the Pyrenees and would be a new way for gas to travel from the Iberian Peninsula to Europe.