Fast track for upgrading foreign-connected pipelines

A robust simplification of the procedures necessary for the upgrading of the gas pipelines connecting Italy to foreign countries. The aim is to speed up the time needed to build the new infrastructure, improving the level of supply to our country.

Italy's energy capacity, at a time of great uncertainty in the international situation, is the amendment that has just been filed with the Senate Environment Committee by the rapporteurs of the law converting the Infrastructure Decree (Decree-Law no. 32/2026, rapporteurs Tilde Minasi, Lega, and Claudio Fazzone, Forza Italia). It provides for very significant deferments to the compensation mechanisms for the territories affected by the works. The proposal, along with the others, will go to the vote next week in Palazzo Madama.

The text provides, first of all, for the preparation of a Dpcm, drafted on the proposal of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security. Essentially, this will be a mapping exercise that will have the task of identifying development interventions, upgrading or modification of gas import pipelines from abroad, declared to be of national strategic interest and "necessary for the security of energy supplies to the country and the European continent". This work will therefore serve to identify opportunities for upgrading certain infrastructures.

Among the conditions for inclusion on this list, pipelines must have already been subject to compensation, according to Law No. 239/2004, which deals precisely with the energy sector. This is a concept repeatedly referred to by that law. State and regions, in building energy infrastructures, guarantee an adequate territorial balance in their location, 'providing for possible measures of compensation and environmental and territorial rebalancing', if a particular concentration 'of activities, plants and infrastructures with a high territorial impact' is necessary.

The upgrading measures included in the decree provided for in the amendment will have access to a derogation from the ordinary rules. The provision of compensatory measures and territorial rebalancing, in these cases, "is not allowed", according to the amendment proposal (which indicates how a part of law no. 239 will not apply to these cases). In other words, an exception is made to the general rule that provides for this type of measure in order to reduce the impact at the territorial level of energy infrastructures.