Spain can help ease energy interdependence woes in EU
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said May 25 that Spain can play a key role in offsetting the challenges to the shortfall in gas supplies to the EU from Russia.
“Spain and, I would say, southern Europe, will have a chance to provide an answer to this energy dependence of Russia fossil energy,” commented Sanchez to CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. He also said the Iberian Peninsula, (Spain and Portugal), is home to around half of the EU’s LNG storage.
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Spain has some 67bn m3 of regasification capacity, but this is significantly underutilised, as the amount of gas it can pump to France is limited by bottlenecks at the border.
Earlier this month, Italy's Snam signed a memorandum with Spain's Enagas to undertake a feasibility study into the construction of a gas pipeline to link the two countries.
Snam said the project would help Italy and Europe further diversify its gas supply. Italy receives close to 40% of its gas supply from Russia's Gazprom, but is looking to phase out these imports in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, largely through an expansion of its LNG regasification capacity.