[Premium] EU Internal Market DIrector Sees Gas as Essential

Europe's gas industry can relax for the time being, but the gas transporters have a clearer future than the suppliers, reading between the lines of a presentation by the European Commission's internal energy markets director Klaus-Dieter Borchardt at the Flame conference in Amsterdam May 17. Hydrogen and renewable gas will have the edge on the basis of known technology while the future of methane will depend on so far uneconomic carbon capture and storage.

However in the short to medium term, gas is safe. He said: "We need a balanced mix of energy sources and technologies, we need improved efficiency of energy use; we need storage of energy... and last but not least we need flexible power generation. Gas can play a very important role."

He also said that gas can play a key role in decarbonisation of energy systems as a whole, but in the longer term its future will depend on the industry's ability to decarbonise.

There will not be any regulatory phase out of coal at the EU level; so, he said, gas "cannot just enter the gap as we push out coal. This is a competition that the gas sector has to win by itself: on economics and technologies. This is a challenge."

He told delegates that there were low hanging fruit. "If you want real results in the short term, replacing coal with gas, this is something that should be done. The EC is aware of it and it has launched a platform for coal regions in transition. This is not easy to do: we have to re-skill workers, but it will happen. That is good news for gas is that it will become the bridge fuel for renewables, no doubt. But talking about a bridge means we have to think beyond 2035: we have a great infrastructure, we will need it once the bridge is over? Natural gas can stay but only in a decarbonised manner. To think in the long run in Europe, in current form as today, it has to be decarbonised and therefore we must reactivate all thinking with regard to carbon capture and storage."

European Commission internal energy markets director Klaus-Dieter Borchardt, photographed in Vienna in 2015 (Photo credit: Austrian regulator E-Control)