(World Oil) – The European Union’s executive arm wants to adopt recommendations next week delaying penalties on energy imports that fail to comply with the bloc’s controversial methane emissions regulation.
Disagreements over the regulation—which targets emissions of the potent greenhouse gas within the EU and imposes new requirements on fossil fuel importers—have intensified after the U.S., Qatar and other gas-producing nations urged the bloc to revise the rules, warning that they could jeopardize energy shipments.
While 17 out of the EU’s 27 nations called last month for targeted amendments to import-related provisions of the methane regulation, the European Commission declined to revise the rules, offering non-binding guidelines. The EU will unveil a set of two recommendations “hopefully next week,” Celine Gauer, the commission’s new director general for energy, told the European Parliament’s industry committee on Tuesday.
The guidelines will “support companies to demonstrate compliance” and “urge member states not to apply penalties for a certain period of time, letting time for the market to adjust, to demonstrate compliance and to go beyond the crisis we are facing at the moment,” she said.
Beginning in 2027, fossil-fuel imports into the EU will have to comply with monitoring, reporting and verification requirements aimed at reducing methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times more heat than CO2 over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. By 2030, imports exceeding a methane-intensity threshold will face penalties. Under the current framework, companies could be fined as much as 20% of their annual turnover.
The U.S., which has become Europe’s largest supplier of LNG, has warned that its supplies will head elsewhere if the bloc refuses to ease the regulation.
On Wednesday, representatives of EU governments in Brussels will debate the impact of the methane regulation, known as EUMR, on the region’s security of supply. Ireland, which holds the EU rotating presidency through the end of this year, asked member states to consider what guidance they would give the commission “to address the concerns related to the implementation of the Methane Regulation,” Bloomberg reported on Monday.
The discussion will follow a debate at a meeting of energy ministers last month, where countries including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belgium, Italy, Poland and Sweden called on the commission to urgently consider options to ease barriers to oil and gas purchases, including a three-year delay to the importer requirements.
The debate comes as the EU seeks to bring down stubbornly high energy costs and diversify supplies amid the conflict in the Middle East and efforts to end reliance on Russian energy. It also underscores the challenges the bloc faces in extending stricter environmental standards to imports from third countries.
For industry, guidelines pledged by the EU are not enough. Over the past few months, companies from the chemicals, oil and gas, and energy trading sectors have called for delaying the requirements, warning that importers risk being pushed into non-compliance. They cited verification as a major bottleneck, with too few recognized protocols and verification bodies.
“We believe that this is a sound legal way of going about the difficulties that we punctually have at the moment,” Gauer told EU lawmakers. “And this is also the most immediate one because once a recommendation is adopted, then it is of course also relevant for national courts and will be directly applicable.”
