By Virginia Furness and Kate Abnett<\/p>\n
LONDON (Reuters) -Investors representing more than 4.5 trillion euros ($5.3 trillion) of assets have urged the EU not to water-down its methane emissions law amid concerns the rules may be weakened to ease U.S. LNG imports, according to a letter seen by Reuters.<\/p>\n
Money managers including Ninety One, Pictet Group, Railpen and Royal London Asset Management urged the EU to stay the course on rules requiring importers of oil and gas to monitor and report the methane emissions of their suppliers.<\/p>\n
Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases and scientists say it is responsible for about one-third of the warming experienced to date since pre-industrial times.<\/p>\n
Investors are concerned the European Union\u2019s methane rules will be brought into the scope of the bloc\u2019s simplification agenda after U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright said recently the current legislation would prevent the United States from exporting liquefied natural gas to Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goals are admirable, and we all want to reduce methane emissions, and we will reduce methane emissions. But having laws that will prevent American gas coming here would be completely unproductive from a social cost and environmental perspective. So yes, those laws absolutely need to be fixed,\u201d Wright said in September.<\/p>\n
The first phase of the EU methane law is in force and does not appear to have affected U.S. gas exports to Europe \u2013 with importers of gas into Europe having to report details of their suppliers\u2019 efforts to reduce methane emissions from May 2025.<\/p>\n
A European Commission spokesperson said it was confident EU methane regulation would not pose any barriers to trade.<\/p>\n
The EU has pledged to hike its purchases of U.S. energy \u2013 including LNG, as well as oil and nuclear fuel \u2013 to $250 billion per year, as part of a trade deal struck earlier this year.<\/p>\n
The investor group warned that reopening the regulation would introduce unpredictability and undermine companies and investors working towards complying with the rules, as well as slow down efforts to reduce the volume of highly damaging methane gas released into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
\u201cWatering down regulation that companies have already based investment decisions on is counterproductive and risks undermining globally agreed methane reduction efforts,\u201d said Eric Pederson, head of responsible investments at Nordea Asset Management.<\/p>\n
Europe has massively increased its imports of U.S. LNG, as it seeks to replace Russian energy after Moscow\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n
The U.S. supplied 57% of the EU\u2019s LNG, or 49.2 billion cubic metres, in January-August this year, Commission data show. The U.S. supplied 28% of the EU\u2019s LNG \u2013 or 18.9 bcm \u2013 in 2021, the year before Russia\u2019s full-scale war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Industries say they are more concerned by a tougher phase of the EU methane law, which will apply from 2027.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8508 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Virginia FurnessEditing by Mark Potter)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Virginia Furness and Kate Abnett LONDON (Reuters) -Investors representing more than 4.5 trillion euros ($5.3 trillion) of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,1699],"class_list":{"0":"post-465584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-european-union"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115298579599781540","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}