Dan Jorgensen, the European Union’s energy commissioner, has asked his officials to examine a one-year postponement of the import provisions in the bloc’s methane regulation, citing the potential effect of compliance costs on energy security and prices.
“I have instructed my services to look into the possibilities of postponing the import part of the legislation with one year,” Jorgensen told Bloomberg. He said a delay could give companies time to comply “without it hurting our security of supply and prices.”
The EU passed the regulation in 2024 to cut methane emissions from the energy sector. Its domestic energy companies have been subject to the same rules since 2024. The import rules are scheduled to enter into effect in January, with firms selling gas, oil and coal into the European market required from January 1, 2027 to show compliance with strict monitoring, reporting and verification standards or face steep penalties.
Those requirements mean exporters must track, measure and report methane emissions, then have the information verified. Yet no agency has been accredited to verify measurement and reporting from production outside the EU. The EU has also neither certified firms to assess producer-level equivalency nor issued the implementing act setting out procedures and standards for national equivalency.
Valentina Kretzschmar, a carbon expert at Wood Mackenzie, said “most oil and gas exporting countries outside Europe are simply not ready to meet the EU equivalence within the timeframe.”
The timing has made the rule a test of who has the stronger hand in the fuel trade. Europe is entering another winter with supply security high on the agenda after the Iran war disrupted global oil and gas flows. Producers can currently choose where to sell oil and gas, while buyers have fewer options.
Qatar and the United States, two of the EU’s largest oil and gas suppliers, threatened to redirect sales if the regulation took effect as planned. Qatar said directly that it would stop selling liquefied natural gas to EU members. It has already stopped selling liquefied gas to the EU for reasons unrelated to the methane rule.
Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, suggested the regulation would damage trade between the United States and the EU. Governments fear suppliers facing fresh compliance risks could send cargoes to other buyers rather than meet the European requirements.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, called last week for a one-year delay. Roughly a dozen EU countries and the United States, Europe’s largest liquefied natural gas supplier, had already urged Brussels to pause or revise the rules.
The potential scale of the problem is large. Analysis estimated that compliance issues could exclude approximately 43% of natural gas imports and 87% of crude oil imports from the EU market in 2027.
The regulation’s purpose remains reducing a gas responsible for 30% of global warming. The immediate question for Brussels is whether it can build the machinery for enforcement quickly enough to keep its import rule on schedule without narrowing the pool of suppliers available to Europe.
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