An ambitious hydrogen gas pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille, officially launched on Friday, will be operational in 2030 and cost around 2.5 billion euros, announced the leaders of France, Spain and Portugal, who have backed the project, which has been welcomed by Brussels. for AFP.

The project should be “completed by 2030,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after meeting Spanish and Portuguese prime ministers Pedro Sánchez and Antonio Costa in Alicante, in southeastern Spain.

Its cost should be “around 2.5 billion euros”, said Sánchez, who specified that by 2030 the pipeline would transport around two million tons of hydrogen per year, or 10% of Europe’s estimated consumption by that date.

This underwater pipeline should allow the transport of so-called “green” hydrogen produced from renewable electricity from the Iberian Peninsula, which aims to become the champion of this energy of the future, to the north of the EU via France.

On the French side, however, it is not excluded that it will also transport hydrogen obtained from nuclear energy.

This project, called “H2Med” or “BarMar” (short for Barcelona and Marseille, the two cities connected by this gas pipeline), replaces the “MidCat”, launched in 2003 to connect the French and Spanish gas networks across the Pyrenees, but ultimately left due to lack of economic interest and opposition from environmentalists and Paris.

In the coming days, it will be submitted to the European Commission to receive the status of a “project of common interest” and thus be partially financed by European funds, Macron added.

Present at the meeting between the three leaders, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen “warmly welcomed” the launch of this project, which “goes in the right direction” as it will help the EU “build a real Europe”. hydrogen backbone”.

“The Iberian Peninsula is on the way to becoming one of the main energy centers of Europe. And the European Union will be part of this “success story”, she added.

Originally designed to temporarily transport gas from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of the EU to reduce dependence on Russian gas, the H2Med will only be used to transport hydrogen, Antonio Costa said.

The decision not to transport fossil fuels was necessary for Brussels to declare it a “project of common interest”.

Paris, Madrid and Lisbon hope to hear back from the Commission in early 2023.

If approved by Brussels, European funding could cover about half of the costs, 1.2 billion euros, French sources said, with the rest covered mainly by member states according to proportions and mechanisms to be determined.

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