BarMar hydrogen pipeline project ‘dead on arrival’, French experts say

Hopes were high for the BarMar hydrogen pipeline project linking Spain and France when it was announced almost a year ago. But with no news since then, French experts say the project was in fact always a non-starter.

Read the original French article here.

In December last year, BarMar was announced as the replacement for the MidCat pipeline, a controversial project aimed at transporting gas from Spain to France across the Pyrenees.

Having been mulled over for more than 20 years, in September 2022 the French government concluded that the MidCat project was both ecologically harmful and economically unviable.

At the same time, the European Commission confirmed that it would be impossible to finance the pipeline with EU funds because the project was designed to transport fossil gas without any certainty that it would eventually be able to transport hydrogen.

In the end, it was French President Emmanuel Macron who put the final nail in the coffin, declaring that “there is no obvious need for it”.

One month later, the project was revived under the name BarMar and presented as a link in a larger hydrogen backbone project called H2Med.

Instead of crossing the Pyrenees like MidCat, BarMar would run along the Mediterranean coast between Barcelona and Marseille, hence its name.

Announced with a bang in Alicante in December 2022 and extended to Germany the following month by the French and German governments, the project has also yet to make any progress, however.

“For the moment, there is nothing concrete, not even a working document,” says Mikaa Blugeon-Mered, a lecturer specialised in the geopolitics of hydrogen at Sciences Po.

“A number of decisions have yet to be taken on the exact route, the distribution of financial commitments and access and connections to the hydrogen pipeline for local ecosystems,” he told Euractiv France at a hydrogen event in early October.

According to the latest announcements, the project is expected to be operational in 2030, with a transit capacity of 2 million tonnes of hydrogen per year, or 20% of the EU’s target import capacity by 2030.

While these transit volumes are crucial to the project’s viability, “the current difficulties in assessing the demand for hydrogen in the medium and long term make this quite ambitious,” a French hydrogen expert and consultant, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to Euractiv France.

“The hydrogen sector is currently facing a number of challenges and delays in deployment,” he continued, adding that one of the main hydrogen production projects for BarMar – the Spanish HyDeal project – has seen its production capacity ambitions reduced from 7 GW in 2030 to 500 MW in 2028, or around 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen per year.

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2030, an unrealistic date?

The French expert is not the only one asking questions.

“I have my doubts about the possibility of obtaining sufficient quantities of clean hydrogen by 2030, at the level required to make an infrastructure of this scale profitable,” said Philippe Boucly, president of industry association France Hydrogène.

In short, the 2030 date “seems illusory”, the hydrogen expert told Euractiv.

The French government does not deny this.

“By 2030 [there will be] no infrastructure for a decarbonised H2 import strategy” in Europe, says the latest working documents from the government’s environmental planning department.

For the H2Med network, which includes the French and German sections of BarMar, the documents even predict deployment “after 2035”.

Effectively, France is adopting a “wait-and-see policy, studying the development of the hydrogen market before taking a decision after 2025”, the expert added.

“The French government is right to take a wait-and-see approach to avoid the risk of investing in stranded assets,” he concludes.

Will the project ever see the light of day?

Given these factors, BarMar would be “dead on arrival, at least in the form in which it was initially presented, given that competition from other hydrogen pipeline projects and sea exports around France is even stronger and more advanced today than it was last year”, says Blugeon-Mered.

Hydrogen industry executives are less pessimistic, although they do not seem entirely sure of the project’s viability either.

“Things are moving forward,” said Jérome Guichard, commercial developer for GRTgaz, the French network operator involved in the project, who spoke at the October event.

But “for us to make progress on concrete studies, we need to have the assurance that the elements are in place at each end of the project,” he acknowledged.

Christophe Grudler, a centrist lawmaker and member of the European Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy Committee, is not categorical about the project’s future either.

“BarMar is not ‘stillborn’, if only because the President of the Republic [Emmanuel Macron] has made a commitment,” he told Euractiv France. So “perhaps European executives are waiting for the end of the Spanish EU presidency to revive the issue”, he added.

For the time being, Spain needs to observe a strict neutrality stance on European energy projects because of its current role as EU presidency holder.

But supporters of the project say progress could be expected in early 2024, when Belgium takes over the EU presidency from Spain.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis that the project will not come to fruition “cannot be ruled out, not least because it is primarily a political order, at a time when Germany has not played its part in recognising low-carbon hydrogen as a European objective,” the hydrogen expert adds.

MidCat pipeline stand-off puts EU's energy solidarity to the test

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s call for greater EU “energy solidarity” during her State of the Union address could be difficult to achieve, as the Franco-Spanish MidCat gas pipeline project – on hold due to France’s continued opposition – already shows.

[Edited by Frédéric Simon/Nathalie Weatherald]

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