On Monday 22 October, the European Commission published a Directive (adopted on 19 October) amending Council Directive 2009/119/EC which concerns methods for calculating storage obligations for crude oil and/or petroleum products.
According to the Commission, the objective is to "continue to guarantee the highest level of security of energy supply in Europe".
New rules (technical amendments) to improve in particular the methodology used by Member States to deduct, when calculating the minimum level of emergency stocks required, the amounts of petroleum products used for non-energy petrochemical applications.
It has also planned to postpone the start of the application of the new annual storage obligation under Directive 2009/119/EC by three months (until the end of June instead of the end of March), in order to give Member States more time to complete their internal administrative procedures and facilitate timely compliance with a reduction in costs, if possible. “Europe's dependency on imports of crude oil and petroleum products remains high", the Commission points out. The conservation of emergency stocks that can be quickly allocated in the event of a disruption to the supply remains important to the Union's energy security. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)