An Overview of Shale Gas Law and Policy

Summary

EUROPEAN POSITION ON SHALE GAS EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION

As the biggest consumers of imported hydrocarbon energy, Member States of the European Union as a whole have long sought to address energy security. The concept has been broadly defined as access to securely supplied, competitively priced and environmentally sound energy resources. Yet, because of its divergent energy trade relations and, to an extent, the EU's aggregate reliance on Eurasian oil and gas trade, the EU energy security context has been primarily driven by price and supply concerns at the level of the Member States. In the absence of significant resources of their own, building internal energy markets and frameworks to institutionalise energy relations with non-EU suppliers have long been at the forefront of the EU's attempts to build an eff ective energy policy with the environmental aspects remaining largely in the orbit of ‘interest’ of the European Commission, the EU's executive body. Importance attached to energy and reluctance on the part of the Member States to relinquish the competence has produced path dependence with two distinct policy ‘specialisms’ at two levels – on the one hand the price and security of supply ‘hard’ focus at the Member State level, and on the other the ‘soft ’ environmental aspects at the European Commission level. This path dependence and legalisation of the policy competences that followed the so-called Lisbon Treaty is now inevitably having an impact on the law and policy on shale gas exploration with all the opportunities and challenges attached to it.

EU LAW AND POLICY ON ENERGY

Perceptions of energy insecurity incentivised some of the Member States of the EU to embrace the idea of shale gas exploration. Yet, due to the overlapping policy ‘interests’ shared between the Member States and the Community levels, the move to embrace shale gas has shaped the trajectory of shale gas politics in case study countries: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and France. The interplay between the EU and Member State level is thus important for understanding political developments. Finally, owing to the overlapping competence between the EU and the Member States, this section also shows how energy governance has evolved, the European Commission's role in it, and whether we are any closer to a more unified stance on shale gas.