ALICANTE. Due to a state of flu, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will not be present at the Eu Med-9 summit in Alicante. The Italian delegation will be led by Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. The summit hosted by Spain with Italy, France, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Croatia and Slovenia, will open at 1.30 pm with an official breakfast: the president of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen and the president of the European Council Charles Michel will also be present . At 15.30 there will be a photo of the Family in Ciudad de la Luz followed by two work sessions (from 16 to 18 and from 18.30 to 20). Press releases are scheduled at 8.15pm.
The H2Med green hydrogen submarine corridor project
As part of the 9th Euro-Mediterranean summit, Spain, France and Portugal will meet to finalize the details of the development of the H2Med green hydrogen submarine corridor, a project which should be presented to the European Commission on 15 December. The meeting will be attended by the Spanish premier, Pedro Sanchez, the French head of state, Emmanuel Macron, and the Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Costa, as well as the president of the EU commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The hydroduct will transport green hydrogen between Barcelona and Marseille and is the solution that the three countries agreed on in October as an alternative to the long-awaited MidCat trans-Pyrenean project, which was rejected by the French executive. Although the initiative is partly due to European interest in reducing Russia’s energy dependence after the invasion of Ukraine, the project will take years and is obviously not designed for the current crisis, but for the transition to renewable energy. Baptized as H2Med or BarMar (contraction of Barcelona and Marseille), the underwater pipeline will allow the transport of green hydrogen, obtained from renewable electricity. Although the timescales are not as agile as those offered by MidCat, the intention of the Spanish government is to present the project to the Commission by 15 December so that it can receive European funding. Specifically, the three countries are counting on the possibility of making use of the “Connecting Europe Facility” programme, funds that the European Union allocates to implement the trans-European energy network policy. However, in the case of new infrastructures, the program offers funding to projects that only transport hydrogen, so the connection that Spain, France and Portugal will build will never be able to transfer natural gas.