SINGAPORE – European Union legislation imposing methane emissions limits on Europe’s oil and gas imports from 2030 will present monitoring challenges, an executive at Norwegian oil company Equinor (NYSE: EQNR) said at the APPEC event on Tuesday.
The law, approved by EU countries in May, will exert pressure on international suppliers to reduce leaks of the potent greenhouse gas.
“You have to have a detailed monitoring…a very precise monitoring of the methane emissions all the way through that value chain to the import,” Simon James, vice president and head of crude trading at Equinor said.
“What’s that going to do to markets, crudes coming in? You have to report that your methane monitoring meets the EU standards. That affects grades, and it’s even going to affect some of the benchmark grades,” he said.
“And you can start to imagine that the grades like WTI, which are now part of the Brent complex, that monitoring is going to be very difficult, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the industry responds and how companies such as yourselves respond to those changes in what is a benchmark and a very important benchmark grade,” he said.
(Source: Reuters)
Mary Lee is a freelance writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. She holds an M.S. degree in business and economic journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York and a certificate in digital marketing from the University of Toronto.
