GasIndustrial has demanded of the Government that it lead at the European level the creation of an aid framework that safeguards the industry "against extraordinary increases in the price of gas".
During the opening of the Gas Industrial Forum 2026 in Madrid, the president of the association of large industrial consumers, Verónica Rivière, warned that the production fabric faces this new energy crisis from a more fragile position than in 2022, after years of high prices, strong volatility, and loss of productive capacity. In this context, she recalled that "industry has had to face three extraordinary crises: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the current conflict in the Middle East".
The organization has conveyed to the Executive the urgency of expanding and adapting the European aid framework so that it explicitly includes the manufacturing industry with high gas consumption.
The current State aid scheme, known as METSAF, ends on December 31 and, according to GasIndustrial, the mechanism that replaces it must also address the specific needs of these intensive consumers.
"Europe already recognized during the previous energy crisis that extraordinary situations require extraordinary responses," Rivière stressed, who argued that the aid "must arrive in time to prevent the industry from continuing to lose competitiveness, because markets do not wait for political or regulatory calendars".
Claim of the Gas-Intensive Consumer Statute
At the same time, GasIndustrial called for the approval of the Gas-Intensive Consumer Statute, a demand that the association has been putting forward for years to the different Governments.
Along these lines, the association’s president emphasized that it is not enough to have punctual support to get through a specific crisis, but that it is essential to have a stable framework that guarantees the continuity of industrial activity and facilitates investment planning in the long term.
GasIndustrial said that industrial gas consumption remains 27% below pre-energy-crisis levels. It also added that in August demand fell by 5.6% compared with the same month of the previous year and that in September the decline widened to 9.4%, with an impact across all gas-intensive sectors. It also pointed out that in October gas prices rose again above 100 euros/MWh, three times as much as before the crisis, according to a statement from the association itself.
Rivière warned that companies are facing this new scenario after stringing together several years of strain and difficulties. "In our industries, when the gas meter goes down, what is going down is production," he said, stressing that energy is "the cost in capital letters for industry," since "it directly conditions its ability to produce, export, invest and maintain employment".