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Producción y mercados energéticos 23/01/19

Latest Energy News

23 January 2019

TOP STORY: French and Spanish regulators reject gas interconnection project The French and Spanish energy regulators, respectively CRE (Commission de régulation de l’énergie) and CNMC (Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia), have dismissed the STEP (South Transit East Pyrenees) gas interconnection project submitted by the gas transmission network operators Terega and Enagas. The €442m interconnector was rejected on grounds that it does not meet the market’s needs and is not sufficiently mature to move forward. The STEP project was announced in July 2018 and would have spread between Barbaira (France) and Figueres (Spain), to support the eastern gas interconnection with France. Its main objective was to increase the French-Spanish gas exchange capacity by 180 GWh/d (6.5 bcm/year) from France to Spain and by 230 GWh/d (8.3 bcm/year) from Spain to France. The construction was slated to start in 2020 and the commissioning date for 2022. The project would have been part of the over €3bn Midcat interconnection project. In 2016, CRE had expressed reserves on the project’s costs and estimated that the project would not improve supply security for France, but would instead increase gas prices for consumers. According to the French regulator, the current gas exchange capacity between Spain and France currently stand at 225 GWh/d (8.1 bcm/year) of which 60 GWh/d (2.2 bcm/year) interruptible in the France-Spain direction.

Companies RWE files acquisition of E.ON’s renewables business (Germany) with the EC German power utility RWE has achieved a major milestone in the current asset swap transaction with its counterpart E.ON and has filed the acquisition of E.ON’s renewable energy business with the European Commission. This filing is the first step of a merger control procedure which is required to complete the asset swap. Read more Greece’s PPC extends deadline for coal-fired capacity bids Greek state-owned power utility Public Power Corporation (PPC) has extended the deadline for binding bids for three coal-fired power plants until the beginning of February 2019, in order to give investors more time to review data on the future sale. The deadline has been repeatedly pushed back since the tender was launched in 2018. Read more Infrastructure & Investments Nigeria’s Central Bank will provide US$206m for Dangote refinery project The Nigerian Central Bank will provide a NGN75bn (US$206m) loan to support the construction of the 650,000 bbl/d Dangote refinery, that is being built by the Nigerian industrial conglomerate Dangote Group. So far, the company has invested around 50% of the US$9bn required for the completion of the refinery in equity,… Read more Egypt will invest US$9bn to modernise its refineries over next four years The Egyptian government has outlined plans to invest approximately US$9bn over the next four years to boost the domestic refined products output to 41 Mt/year. Egypt currently has eight refineries with a capacity of 38 Mt/year, of which only 25 Mt/year are utilized. In 2017, about 26 Mt of refined products were produced in Egypt, a level which has remained stable during the last decade. Read more Snowy Hydro appoints contractors for 2 GW hydropower project (Australia) Australian state-run power generation company Snowy Hydro has appointed several Australian and global contractors as preferred tenderers for the up to AUD4.5bn (US$3.2bn) Snowy 2.0 expansion project, which will include a 2,000 MW pumped-storage expansion at the existing Snowy Scheme in New South Wales (south-east Australia). Read more German regulator clears 1st section of Ultranet HDVC power line project The German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA) has approved the route for the first section (60 km) of the 340 km long Ultranet high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power line that will stretch between Osterath in North Rhine-Westphalia to Philippsburg in Baden-Württemberg (south-west Germany), transmitting wind power from the North Sea to the southern German market. Read more