OREANDA-NEWS The European Commission may consider the possibility of building a gas pipeline between the Spanish city of Barcelona and the Italian city of Livorno across the Mediterranean, the newspaper El País reports. According to preliminary plans, the length of the gas pipeline will be 700 kilometers. The construction of the project will require €2.5-3 billion, and its implementation will take one to two years. It is noted that Spain has six operating regasification plants - the most in Europe, but the country is poorly connected to the rest of the continent.

"At the height of the energy crisis, the EC for the first time directly spoke about the possibility of betting on a gas pipeline connecting the Iberian Peninsula with Italy along the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea," the newspaper writes.

Earlier, Czech journalist Jan Machacek said that the European Union agreed to bypass its own sanctions by buying gas from Russia for rubles. He recalled that the restrictions against the Russian Federation were introduced with great fanfare, Brussels quite recently rejected the Russian conditions for paying for gas. Now almost all European countries have agreed to them.

Turkish economist Erdal Karagel, in turn, said that a split occurred in European countries due to issues of gas supplies from Russia and energy dependence on the country. In his article, he wrote that the dependence of the continent on Russian gas is 40%, but each country differs in this indicator. For example, Italy purchases more than 50% of its natural gas from Moscow, while France purchases only 25%.