Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Teresa Ribera receives H2med Consortium CEOs

to be informed of the advancement of the European hydrogen corridor.

This Tuesday, June 24, the  Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition at the European Commission, Teresa Ribera, has received the five CEOs of the H2med consortium: Arturo Gonzalo (Enagás, Spain), Pierre Duvieusart (Deputy CEO NaTran, France), Thomas Hüwener (OGE, Germany), Rodrigo Costa (REN, Portugal) and Carolle Foissaud (Teréga, France) to discuss the progress of the H2med clean hydrogen corridor project. 

It was an opportunity for the Commissioner to exchange views on the advancement of the H2med project which will help to meet EU targets of decarbonisation and to cover 10% of European hydrogen consumption by 2030. 

The CEOs expressed the need to maintain a supportive policy as well as ambitious targets on hydrogen and provide visibility as soon as possible on the regulatory framework which will be implemented on these projects in order to be able to take investment decisions in due time, in line with the Alicante agreement (see last paragraph).

The consortium partners also announce an important milestone for H2med: the signature of the Grant Agreements for the BarMar (Barcelona–Marseille) and CelZa (Celorico–Zamora) PCI projects— key components of the H2med initiative—, following the announcement made last January by the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). The signature of the grant agreements with CINEA enables both projects to effectively receive the allocated funding under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) for Energy: €28,336,978 to fund engineering studies for the BarMar project, including marine and environmental reconnaissance campaigns, and additional €7,221,872 allocated to the CelZa project to support the basic and detailed engineering phases of the pipeline and compressor station.

The European funding —which represents 100% of the requested CEF funds and 50% of the investment in the current phase of the project— will allow progress on basic and detailed infrastructure engineering, as well as on environmental impact studies and permitting. The European funds granted for H2med-related projects represent 39% of the total funding approved by CINEA for hydrogen projects.

This milestone marks a new stage in the development and concretisation of the project, also building on the creation of the H2med Alliance last December, which aims at bringing European partners on board the project to develop a fully integrated value chain along the hydrogen corridor.

The H2med project was first presented by the leaders of the governments of Portugal, Spain, and France, with the support of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in Alicante (Spain) at the Euromed summit on December 9, 2022, and the support of Germany was added in January 2023. Following this initial impulse, the operators of Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany presented the project at an event in Berlin in October 2023, where the support of the governments of these four countries and that of the European Commission —as well as that of the industry and the main players in the sector in Germany —, was ratified.