The EU auditors’ report analyzes the anti-gas crisis measures of the last 2 years
Europe is not “fully prepared” to face a new one gas crisis. The emergency measures adopted by Brussels with the invasion of Ukraine to disengage from imports from Russia – the RePowerEU plan – yes, they worked, but their benefits “they are not always clear” and their impact “often cannot be proven”. This is the warning launched by the European Court of Auditors on 24 June.
Luck or good policies?
The problems – or questions – identified by the Strasbourg court are many. First: the EU has managed to achieve the community objective of reducing gas demand by 15%. The measure served to ease the pressure on supplies while the Twenty-Seven and Brussels struggled to replace supplies from Russia, which before the war accounted for 45% of European gas imports. But the Court of Auditors underlines that it is not possible to establish whether Europe has crossed this finish line, so to speak, on its own two feet. The role of external factors – high gas prices and more than mild winters – may have been decisive.
Then there are some unknowns regarding the obligation to fill the storage facilities. The EU has set the minimum threshold at 90%, and has more than exceeded it. Is it enough to celebrate victory? We don’t know, says the Court of Auditors, why “this simply reflects normal storage fill levels” before the gas crisis. The same goes for the effectiveness of the gas price cap. Since the EU introduced it, prices have remained much lower than the threshold.
The same can be said for the possibility of carrying out joint purchases between states. Does the tool really work? The Strasbourg Court cannot answer why “crisis-induced differences in gas prices between EU member states had already decreased substantially” when AggregateEU, the ad hoc platform, came into operation.
How to prepare for a new gas crisis
What to change, and how, to avoid being caught unprepared for a new gas crisis? European auditors cite three actions. “Consolidate” access to gas. The joint purchasing platform should serve precisely this purpose, but the Commission “does not have the tools and legal skills to achieve the declared objectives”. Then we have to improve solidarity between states by signing more bilateral agreements, to avoid – as would probably happen – that in the event of a gas crisis, supplies to a neighboring country are interrupted in the wake of the emergency.
Finally, the chapter CO2 capture and storage (CCS). The Court speaks of “insufficient progress”: the 4 commercial projects in operation today guarantee 1.5 million t CO2 per year and are “a drop in the ocean” compared to the objective of 450 million tonnes per year by 2050. A non-secondary aspect given “the need to reduce carbon emissions resulting from gas consumption” That “it will be an increasingly important feature in the EU security of supply landscape”.
