Speaking to Lusa and SIC in Ribeira Grande, Tiago Antunes defended that "the realisation of energy interconnections between Portugal, Spain and the rest of Europe" is “an almost obvious thing in the current geopolitical context”.

“Portugal, its Atlantic coast and the port of Sines can be a gateway for energy in Europe coming from very different sources”, he declared.

The Secretary of State insisted that the European Union (EU) needs to “find alternatives to the supply of energy raw materials from the east, namely from Russia”.

“This idea is gaining headway. We think this is the moment. This is the ideal context to once and for all fulfil this important need that Portugal has been defending at a European level”, he said.

Tiago Antunes defended that the Iberian Peninsula “has to stop being an energy island” in the European context.

“In the future, we have enormous potential for the production of renewable gases, in particular green hydrogen, which we can produce cheaply and quite efficiently in Portugal and which we can export to the rest of Europe,” he added.

Despite acknowledging that “it has been difficult to implement this idea”, the Secretary of State stressed that the energy connection via Portugal has “increasingly more supporters”, giving the example of the statements of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who called for the construction of a gas pipeline to reduce dependence on Russian gas.

“We will only stop having these dependencies and these energy vulnerabilities that we are now witnessing when we have a true European energy market, which is fully integrated, and for that we have to have connections”, he reinforced.