Nearly half of EU member states, oil and gas companies and the US administration claim the EU’s methane regulation is unfinished, causes legal risks, and could disrupt Europe’s gas supplies. But does it?
Wester van Gaal
At last Friday’s (26 June) energy council in Luxembourg, 12 member states, led by the Czech Republic and including the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Belgium, pushed the European Commission to put the bloc’s methane import rules on hold for three years.
They specifically want article 28 delayed.
That rule requires oil, gas and coal companies to prove, from 2027, that anything they import under contracts signed after August 2024 meets EU-equivalent standards, or face penalties.
Importers with older contracts only have to prove that they’ve undertaken “all reasonable efforts” to do the same. They can be sanctioned, but only if they consistently fail to report on their efforts.
But despite these flexibilities, and because it hasn’t been ironed out exactly how monitoring and reporting is supposed to happen, importers face a measure of legal uncertainty.
This, the member states warned in a letter ahead of the meeting, could lead “some producers to reduce or temporarily suspend deliveries to the EU or shift supplies to more permissive markets.”
Suspending the import rules would allow the EU to clarify verification protocols and reporting methodology through delegated acts, reducing the legal risk.
The question is, do they have a point?
Sanctions and US pressure
Why does methane matter? Gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels. But liquid gas, which can be shipped across oceans, can cause more emissions than normal gas due to methane leaks during that journey.
Because methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, full life-cycle emissions of liquified gas can be 33 percent higher even than coal, a 2024 Cornell study found.
EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen on Friday said that he stood “very firm in not wanting to reopen the legislation.”
But he also promised “to take concerns on implementation into our analysis,” and provide member states with further recommendations “quite soon.”
The commission is already considering waiving penalties for three years, as part of a possible compromise, citing the risk cargoes might be redirected to other regions.
But the member states said this doesn’t go far enough because of the non-binding nature of the waiver. Therefore, it “does not remove significant legal uncertainty for importers negotiating long-term supply contracts,” the member states write.
The legal argument revolves around the fact that various parts of the regulation remain unfinished.
The commission has yet to decide which countries outside the EU have rules strict enough to count as equivalent, and the national systems for accrediting independent verifiers are not yet built.
Energy lawyers whose clients include Shell, RWE and Eurogas wrote in a peer-reviewed journal that these unfinished elements “will make contract negotiations more difficult and will negatively affect the security of gas supply,” because some companies might decide to postpone signing contracts.
The same argument is echoed by member states, who wrote that “many importers cannot knowingly sign contracts where compliance with EU law is uncertain.”
“Even if competent authorities initially apply a flexible approach, companies remain exposed to later legal challenges,” the member states also wrote.
A campaign built on a worst case
The problem with this theory is that major gas deals keep happening.
Venture Global, a large US liquid gas exporter, signed a 20-year deal with Italy’s gas giant Eni for two million tonnes a year in July 2025, on top of similar long-term deals with buyers in Germany, Spain and Greece.
The Clean Air Task Force, a US non-profit, recently argued that these recent deals disprove claims that legal uncertainty is freezing the market.
Yet the theory persists, and is gaining ground among member states.
