President of Med-TSO, Mr Noureddine Boutarfa
The President of Med-TSO : “We need to reverse the paradigm of poverty and political instability, and restore peace and economic growth in our region”
The President of the Association of the Mediterranean Transmission System Operators Med-TSO, Mr Noureddine Boutarfa, and the President of the Association of the Mediterranean Energy Regulators Medreg, Dr. Hafez El-Salmawy participated to the meeting for the Launch of Euro-Mediterranean Energy Platforms, on the invitation of the Kingdom of Morocco Minister of Energy, Mines, Water and Environment. The meeting took place in Rabat, on May, 5th 2015 in the presence of the European Commissioner for Climate Action & Energy Miguel Arias Cañete and of the European Director General Energy Dominique Ristori.
In this occasion,Med-TSO President marked the willingness of all of moving towards a common sharing of the two shores of the Mediterranean.
President Boutarfahad firstly pointed the attention on the almost daily tragedies happening between Europe and Africa, in the middle of the Mediterranean, that showed to the world the huge risks illegal migrants take to join Europe, but he regretted “have not prompted yet a debate on the truly causes of the phenomenon”. He also mentioned the need to “reverse the paradigm of poverty and political instability, and restore peace and economic growth in our region” choosing common solutions, based, onhis opinion, on “multilateral cooperation, large-scale energy infrastructure development”.
In this perspective,Mr. Boutarfa insisted on the need to consider, without distinctions,electricity and gas as creator paradigms of richness and elements to share:“The existing segmentation between gas and electricity should be eliminated” he stated.
This global and “ambitious” vision requires “a truly multilateral approach”, which “will allowus to sustain large scale industrial projects” and to achieve in the end “financial opportunities on both shores of the Mediterranean, and drive social and economic development for the region as a whole”.
In this sense, he called for such support Euro-Mediterranean and Arab intergovernmental institutions, in order to provide the required institutional cover to cooperation projects in the energy sector, with the aim to “overcome unavoidable differences between participating countries and fostering consensus for launching common interest projects for the short, medium and long term”