Enagás is promoting various initiatives and projects to adapt its assets and to develop new infrastructure to meet the challenges of the energy transition. One of these is H2med.
H2med will be the first green hydrogen corridor in the European Union, promoted by Enagás together with the TSOs of France (Teréga and NaTran), Portugal (REN) and Germany (OGE). This project, scheduled to start in 2030, was included as aEuropean Project of Common Interest (PCI) in April 2024 and the European Commission has given the green light to 100% of the CEF funds requested by Enagás and its European partners for the study phase of this corridor.
The H2med corridor envisages the creation of two hydrogen infrastructures: CelZa and BarMar.
CelZa is a 248 km interconnection between Portugal and Spain (Celorico da Beira-Zamora) with a maximum capacity of 0.75 million tonnes (Mt) of hydrogen per year. It will also include a 24.6 MW compressor station in Zamora.
BarMar is a 455 km sub-sea pipeline between Spain and France (Barcelona-Marseille) with a maximum capacity of 2 million tonnes (Mt) per year and will include a 140 MW compressor station in Barcelona.
Specifically, H2med will connect hydrogen networks from the Iberian Peninsula to North-West Europe, facilitating the development of a liquid and competitive pan-European market for this energy vector. The project will have the capacity to transport up to 2 million tonnes of green hydrogen produced in Spain and Portugal to other European nations. This represents 10% of the overall consumption target set for Europe.
In order to identify the hydrogen infrastructure needs of the entire hydrogen value chain in Europe, the partners launched a non-binding Call For Interest process at the end of 2024, the results of which were presented to the industry in a webinar held on February 10, 2025.
In addition, the preliminary engineering studies and the analysis of alternative routes for the BarMar project corridor are being developed, and the social and economic impact studies are being finalised.
This project is an example of public-private partnership, as it is supported by the infrastructure operators of four countries and their respective governments. H2med was presented at the Euromed summit in Alicante on 9 December 2022 by the governments of Portugal, Spain and France, with the support of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and in January 2023 the support of Germany was added through the TSO, OGE. In October 2023, the project partners met in Berlin to ratify the support of the governments of these four countries and of the European Commission, as well as that of the industry and the main players in the sector in Germany.
H2med’s driving partners Spain, Portugal, France and Germany have developed ambitious national hydrogen strategies to achieve the common goal of climate neutrality by 2050.
Transmission system operators in these countries are aiming to build national hydrogen transmission and storage infrastructures that will connect consumption and production areas across their territories and allow surplus hydrogen to be exported to other European countries.
Enagás, as provisional manager of the hydrogen network in Spain, has developed a proposal for a hydrogen backbone infrastructure with a 10-year horizon, which it presented to the Directorate General for Energy Policy and Mines of the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge in April 2024.
It is expected that by 2030 a green energy corridor will be created from south-west to north-west Europe by connecting the Spanish grid with the Portuguese, French and German grids.
Find more information about H2med in the project's website: h2medproject.com
