EU Methane Regulation: Addressing the tracing issue to improve compliance

Read the full joint statement here.

Eurogas and five other industry associations have produced a joint paper outlining the "tracing issue" present in complex gas and crude oil value chains that make it difficult to comply with the EU Methane Regulation.

The tracing issue describes the difficulty in pinpointing the exact origin of certain energy molecules throughout their sometimes long, often complex journey since production. The EU Methane Regulation requires importers to trace these molecules nonetheless, which is a significant challenge in most cases because the gas arrives in a mixed, or "comingled," form, with little to no interaction between importers and the original producers.

This comes at a time when the EU is making a final legislative push to diversify its energy supply away from Russian sources, complicating the contracting of third-country imports at a time when it needs to be attracting those volumes.

Some concepts and schemes have been developed to solve the tracing issue, but they do not adequately consider the current gas and crude market structures, and are thus unlikely to be implementable without considerable cost and disruption to existing markets.

However, we believe that, especially for complex value chains, verified certificates are the most efficient solution to enable compliance with the EU Methane Regulation. These would include the information required by the regulation, as well as that which is transferred from a producer who can provide the required data to the importer.

Read more about the tracing issue and our proposed certification scheme below.