On Monday 6 February, negotiators from the Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU and from the European Parliament, led by rapporteur and chair of the Parliamentary energy committee Jerzy Buzek (EPP, Poland), began the process of trialogue negotiations with the Commission on the revised regulation on the security of gas supply.
“It won't be easy but all three institutions are open to compromise”, said Buzek after the first meeting on Monday evening.
“This first meeting was wide-ranging. The Council and the Parliament set out their respective positions on the most sensitive issues”, a Community source told us, citing regional cooperation and the organisation of regional groups, information exchange, consumer protection and, “the most difficult point”, solidarity and compensation mechanisms.
“No one was expecting great progress to be made at the first trialogue meeting. But everyone agrees that an agreement has to be reached quickly”, this source continued.
The process is likely to be laborious and the negotiators expect to have to meet several times before coming to agreement, our source told us. A second meeting is scheduled for the start of March.
On Monday, Parliament negotiators started their desire to raise the level of ambition of the revised text which sets out new rules allowing member states to turn to other member states for gas supplies in cases of emergency and on which the Parliament adopted its position on 13 October (see EUROPE 11645).
The Council has yet to agree a common approach on the revised text but energy ministers provided guidance for the Slovak Presidency at the start of December on the three key issues of the draft text: regional cooperation, exchange of information on commercial contracts for the supply of gas, and solidarity (see EUROPE 11682).
The revised security of gas supply regulation, along with the revised mechanism on transparency in intergovernmental energy agreements (a text inter-institutional agreement has already been reached) (see EUROPE 11712), is a flagship proposal of the gas security package tabled by the Commission in February 2016 (see EUROPE 11491). (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)