BRUSSELS: European leaders will discussed plans to exploit shale gas in summit talks yesterday as part of a decades-long quest to develop more secure and competitive energy supplies.
The 27-nation bloc finds itself looking on with envy as its biggest economic rival, the United States, exploits vast reserves of shale gas, delivering drastically reduced fuel costs.
While Europe has shale plans of its own, there is as yet no unified EU policy. The reserves will be far harder to extract than in the United States and the final cost to consumers is likely to be substantially higher so Europe will not be able to free itself of dependence on gas imports from Russia any time soon.
“Already in 2012, industry gas prices were four times lower in the US than in Europe,” Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a speech yesterday. “For electricity prices, the EU is almost twice as expensive as the US. So this is above all a debate about our energy security and our competitiveness.”
Draft documents prepared for the five-hour summit, which will begin today afternoon in Brussels, list energy costs as a prime concern in the EU quest for competitiveness, jobs and growth.
Apart from completing the single energy market, proposed solutions include developing “indigenous energy resources” — Commission code for shale gas, as well as green sources.
Ireland, which as the rotating presidency of the EU leads debate until the end of June, said the challenge is to combine the bloc’s long-term carbon-cutting goals with affordability.
“There are member states who under no circumstances want their eye taken off the decarbonisation agenda,” Irish Energy Minister Pat Rabbitte told reporters.
“It (shale gas) will be more problematic in Europe than it has proven be in the United States. There are all kinds of cultural and other reasons for that.”
Lithuania, which takes over as EU president on July 1, is among the EU member states most dependent on imported Russian gas for which it pays far more than the EU average.
Its Energy Minister, Jaroslav Neverovic, is looking for opportunities to develop Lithuanian shale gas, while also hoping that the United States will eventually export shale gas to Europe cheaply.
Reuters
