EU's joint gas procurement efforts have failed

The EU's flagship joint gas platform covers only a small part of the bloc's demand. Such findings raise doubts about extending it to critical minerals and hydrogen. The experiment has failed, the initiative has failed. This is reported by the British newspaper Financial Times.

Sources familiar with the internal data say the joint procurement operation, dubbed AggregateEU ​​and launched at the height of the energy crisis, has resulted in only around 2% of all pre-declared demand being contracted.



The platform was inspired by the successful coordination of vaccine procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic by using bloc-wide guarantees rather than individual states to obtain lower prices. Under the scheme, the European Commission tasked each member state to ensure that local participating companies submit orders equivalent to 15% of each country’s commitment to fill gas storage facilities.

The actual purchase of gas remained voluntary. In total, the platform matched buyers and sellers of blue fuel with a need for 43 billion cubic meters, but only about 1 billion cubic meters of gas was ultimately contracted, according to three people familiar with the confidential data. EU officials stressed that the companies were not obliged to provide commercially sensitive data, so more contracts could have been concluded. But that did not happen.

Energy companies that took part in the EC initiative said the platform acted more as a matchmaking tool than as a means of managing demand to achieve lower prices.

A senior EU diplomat told the FT that governments initially had trouble persuading companies to sign up to the procurement project to fill the quotas set by the commission. Given the difficulties in organising the joint procurement, the end result was also mediocre and showed the initiative had little prospects.