OGP urges EU Parliament: consider exploration & production differences in environmental impact assessment
In an effort to avoid undermining Europe’s economic recovery, OGP has encouraged the European Parliament to prevent undesirable consequences from new European Union environmental impact legislation.
OGP’s call came as the Parliament prepared to vote on a revision of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive. The Association highlighted concerns about the text under discussion during an OGP-sponsored event at the Parliament on 2nd September.
“In its current version, the legislation risks halting new shale gas projects because of the requirement to undertake long, complex and costly environmental studies at an unnecessarily early stage, before a full understanding of the opportunity (including its scale) has been gained,” said Roland Festor, OGP’s EU Affairs Director.
“The proposal would not necessarily bring additional environmental benefits. Instead, it would undermine efforts to develop domestic gas opportunities and erode EU attempts to spur growth, create new jobs, improve security of supply and fight against CO2 emissions,” Mr. Festor explained. “All of this,” he added, “would be contrary to the intent of the proposed legislation, which is to streamline, simplify and improve effectiveness and procedures.”
Instead, the Parliament’s proposed requirements would make assessing the environmental impact of shale gas opportunities, for example, needlessly and unrealistically complicated. This is especially true for the first stages of exploration, when there is no guarantee of any scope for commercial development.
To avoid such consequences, OGP has asked the members of the European Parliament to differentiate in the legislation between requirements for exploration – which often involves a single well at a site – and those for production. In this way, time and resources would be applied where they matter: on full environmental studies once an opportunity’s economic potential and scale have been successfully confirmed and development is to be carried out.
