Council Gives Fossil Fuel Importers Another Year on Methane, and Argues It Is Doing It for Energy Security

The Council of the EU agreed on 6 November to postpone a set of methane monitoring requirements for imported oil, natural gas and coal by one year, citing pressure on global energy markets and supply security concerns linked to the conflict in the Middle East.

The agreement sets out the member states' negotiating position rather than final approval. The Council now needs agreement with the European Parliament before the changes take effect, and it wants that done before the end of the year because the original import obligations begin on 1 January 2027.

The three deadlines that move

Monitoring, reporting and verification obligations for importers will now apply from 1 January 2028, instead of 1 January 2027.

The requirement to report methane intensity moves from 5 August 2028 to 5 August 2029.

Maximum methane intensity limits take effect on 5 August 2031 rather than in 2030. The latter two apply to domestic EU producers as well as importers.

The argument being made

"More than ever, we need secure and reliable energy supplies in Europe," said Darragh O'Brien, Ireland's minister for climate, energy and environment, whose presidency is steering the file. "The Council's agreement today proposes a pragmatic approach forward, addressing the pressures in the energy market, while maintaining the EU's global leadership in reducing methane emissions."

The security argument is that importers facing new verification duties would have less room to source from whatever supplier is available, at exactly the moment Europe is trying to replace disrupted volumes. The counter-argument is that leaked methane is wasted gas, so a regulation designed to reduce waste is not in tension with security but is a route to it.

"Europe cannot improve its energy security by delaying measures designed to reduce that waste," Dr Lea Pilsner of the Environmental Defense Fund told EU Perspectives in October. More than 30 civil society organisations wrote to the Commission this month urging it not to weaken the regulation.

How it got here

The Commission proposed a targeted one-year delay on 14 October. EU leaders endorsed it at their October summit, which is unusual for a technical implementing detail and indicates how directly the supply anxiety reached the European Council. The European Parliament went further on 22 October, voting for a three-year delay to the import restrictions, which puts the two institutions a long way apart as talks begin.

The regulation itself was adopted in May 2024 and entered into force that August, introducing stricter rules for measuring, reporting and verifying emissions across the energy sector and extending transparency requirements to imported fossil fuels. Its political logic was to stop the EU from counting its own emissions while importing the leak.

The escape hatch

One provision in the Council position is worth more attention than the headline delay. The Commission will assess by 30 September 2027 whether the conditions for the import requirements are in place, including the availability of independent verifiers and agreed rules for exchanging emissions data between producers and importers. If they are missing, the Commission can postpone the import monitoring requirements again by secondary legislation, without returning to the co-legislators.

That converts a one-year delay into a rolling one, contingent on an administrative infrastructure most exporting countries have shown no urgency in building.

Methane accounts for around 30 per cent of global warming. The measure Europe is deferring is not a cap on emissions; it is the requirement to measure them. What slips is not the obligation to reduce but the obligation to know.