The third session of interinstitutional negotiations on the regulation of the gas package (one directive, one regulation) took place on Thursday 28 September and focused on joint purchasing and aggregation of demand, solidarity between Member States, biomethane production targets, diversification and imports from third countries, and cross-border tariffs, without any major conclusions at this stage.
Demand aggregation
Discussions continued on the introduction of a binding instrument for joint purchasing and demand aggregation (particularly in crisis situations, such as AggregateEU - see EUROPE 13255/30), as called for by the European Parliament.
The Council is adamant on the issue and is considering voluntary participation in the mechanism. Parliament has shown itself to be open to working in this direction. However, it still hopes to define the conditions for the Council to agree to make this mechanism compulsory in certain very specific circumstances.
The Council also wishes to exclude hydrogen from the aggregation of demand. It could therefore be that only an assessment of hydrogen demand is envisaged initially, before actually including hydrogen in aggregation demand at a later stage.
With regard to this aggregation of demand, the co-legislators asked the European Commission to present new suggestions for a text.
Biomethane
While the Parliament would like to make the target of producing 35 billion m³ of biomethane a year by 2030 binding, the Council would prefer a non-binding “EU target”. An agreement could be reached with the Parliament if the Member States agreed to map their potential production, for example, but no conclusion has yet been reached.
With regard to the discussions on solidarity (see EUROPE 13255/1), diversification and imports from third countries such as Russia and Belarus, positions also diverge, with Parliament being intransigent on this last point and not wishing under any circumstances to continue purchasing gas from these countries.
The co-legislators also discussed cross-border tariffs for gas and hydrogen, as well as tariff reductions, for the very first time, simply reiterating their respective positions (see EUROPE 13151/1, 13119/6).
These points now need to be analysed and discussed in greater detail at a technical level.
To view the 4-column document: https://aeur.eu/f/8ol (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)