The European Green Deal identifies hydrogen as key to a clean and circular economy. Furthermore, the European Union (EU) issued a specific hydrogen strategy in 2020, bundling measures to promote a fast and targeted development of production capacities for green hydrogen.  And so with a nod to this emerging energy vision for Europe, the once touted MidCat gas interconnector project between France and Spain will be replaced with a green energy corridor and a new pipeline linking Barcelona to Marseille, Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, announced yesterday.

The future subsea pipeline, dubbed BarMar, will connect Barcelona to Marseille and transport green hydrogen as well as gas during the transition.

“We have reached an agreement to replace the MidCat project with a new project called the green energy corridor that will link the Iberian Peninsula to France and therefore to the European energy market,” Sanchez told reporters in Brussels as he arrived for an EU summit following a meeting with his Portuguese counterpart Antonio Costa and French President Emmanuel Macron.

As of this printing, there has yet to be an official response from Berlin, but given Chancellor Scholz's support of a MidCat extension through France as well as Germany's disposition to green energy projects, it is safe to assume that Germany will welcome this new future infusion of green hydrogen into the European grid.