Abstract
Hydrocarbons are traditional subjects to European Union (EU) law (“acquis communitaire”). A short historical review reveals that quasi all aspects of upstream and downstream segments are covered by the legislation. The results of applied information extraction and elaborated quantitative analysis indicate that the intensity of legislation making correlates with global drivers such as oil price booms, and technology developments such as extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons by hydraulic fracturing. A quarter of a century after the Hydrocarbons Directive was published and transposed by Member States (MS), data allow us to make a semi-quantitative assessment on the implementation, the major drivers of governments’ publication activity, and the impact on the oil and gas production. Another specific relevance of this study is on non-energy minerals management of the EU, whether the introduction of similar competitive bidding rules would induce a greater interest of investors, and the enhanced competition could bring more benefits to the states by the rejuvenation of the critical minerals extractive sector. The preliminary findings show that in some MS there is a positive correlation between the concession call publication activity and hydrocarbons production. To confirm these conclusions the analysis of an extended dataset including exploration data, investments, and social impacts is needed in order to screen the effect of global market trends, the exhaustion of domestic geological reserves, and the different policy environments.
Highlights
Oil and gas are fossil fuels, non-renewable resources that account for 60–65% of the total final energy consumption and 20–25% of the domestic energy production in the European Union (EU) (IAE, [1])
The Amsterdam Treaty (1997) implemented a coherent community policy on the environment by adopting the concept of sustainable development: “this policy shall contribute to a pursuit of the objective of prudent and rational utilization of natural resources.”
The upstream of the hydrocarbons sector, i.e., exploration and extraction, was out of scope (e.g., Waste Framework Directive, Appendix A [4]) but the downstream such as distillation, refining, processing, storage were covered by the Seveso I
Summary
Oil and gas are fossil fuels, non-renewable resources that account for 60–65% of the total final energy consumption and 20–25% of the domestic energy production in the EU (IAE, [1]). In 1994, a progressive piece of EU secondary legislation was published on the rules of hydrocarbons exploration and production May 1994 on the conditions for granting and using authorizations for the prospection, exploration and production of hydrocarbons) The European Commission (EC) monitors the implementation of EU legislation; no such report has been published since 1998 (EC [5]), in spite of the obligation of Article 9 that MS shall publish an annual report on the geographical areas opened, authorizations and entities granted, as well as the reserves.
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