Spain pulverizes its record of gas exports to France due to strikes against Macron’s pension reform

2023-05-01 19:24:03

spain pulverizes its natural gas export record a France. In April, the flow through the two interconnections that unite both countries, Irún in the Basque Country and Larrau for Navarra, has amounted to 6.52 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to the operator of the Spanish gas system, enagas. Thus, the maximum mark registered in May 2022when they were sent through the Pyrenees about 5.9 TWh of gas after the start of the war in Ukraine and the fear of shortages on the continent.

This time, the record is due to the strikes called against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, which involves raising the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years. three out of four regasification terminals liquefied natural gas (LNG) companies have been stops from the past March 9 due to strikeas explained last week by the CEO of Enagás, Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri in the conference with analysts to present the results for the first quarter of the year.

Those strikes produced a decrease in local production of gas and, therefore, a greater dependence on imports to satisfy your national demand. In fact, from the beginning of the strike in the neighboring country until seven methane tankers bound for french terminals have been “diverted” to Spanish plants for regasification and subsequent shipment through the gas pipeline, according to Aizpiri.

In total, for the year as a whole, the flow to France amounted to 9.8 TWh. According to Enagás records, the export balance began to skyrocket to close to maximum capacity last March 22. So much so that, from then on and for the next ten days, spain it shipped more gas via pipeline to France than came via pipeline from Algeria. In the accumulated of April, the flow through the Almería interconnection was slightly higher (about 6.9 TWh) to the amount that left through the Pyrenees.

And all this, despite the incident in the irun compression station, in mid-February, which limited the capacity of that pipeline. However, since April 4 the maximum capacity of the interconnection was 225 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the existing limit before the possibility of sending gas through the Pyrenees was increased in November last year to around 265 GWh per day. This figure will be recovered, according to the CEO of Enagás, “in the coming days”. The average daily shipment during the month of April it has been about 217 GWh.

Last year, the government of Pedro Sanchez wanted to take advantage of the unborn MidCat pipeline to double the current capacity of natural gas flows between Spain and France, with the aim of converting it to hydrogen in the future, but the refusal of the Macron government led to betting on a pipeline that, priori, only hydrogen was transported, the so-called H2Med or BarMar.