France believes that building the MidCat “would take too long” and “would not respond to the current crisis”.

France has not welcomed with enthusiasm the aspirations of its neighbors to build a gas pipeline across the Pyrenees to link Spain with Europe and has assessed that the project, known as MidCat, “would take a long time to be operational” and “therefore, would not respond to the current crisis”.

The reaction of France, which would be in charge of transporting this gas to the center of the continent, comes after the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, asserted that they had been “a long time” asking to reactivate a project with which they intend to transport Algerian gas through Spain to the rest of Europe.

However, Algeria and Spain’s relations are not going through their best moment, after the crisis unleashed in June by Madrid’s support for Morocco’s plan on Western Sahara, so that the supply to the European country has been significantly reduced.

Sanchez’s words were in turn a reaction to some of the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who assured that the MidCat “would contribute greatly” to facilitate the energy supply, in question after the war in Ukraine.

Scholz is one of those most interested in the reactivation of this project due to the fact that Germany is one of the European countries most dependent on imports of Russian gas, for which alternatives are being sought as a measure of pressure due to the war initiated by Moscow in Ukraine.