“Tool of energy sovereignty”, “useful for the ecological transition”… gas is presented by its promoters as having become essential. All around the planet, gas projects are multiplying, as demand continues to increase. While climatologists and even the International Energy Agency advocate an exit from gas to limit global warming. What are the levers to achieve this?
« Managing the decline of a energy is extremely complicated, socially, of course, but also strategically and geopolitically”underlines Claire Bordenave. She knows the gas sector well. She worked there for 35 years. And she notes that “ it is not very motivating for companies in the sector to manage this decline. Moreover, it is contrary to their social purpose which is not the suicide program”.
If the impetus to organize the exit from natural gas will not come, a priori, from those primarily concerned in the gas sector, where should we turn then?
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What role should the financial sector play?
More and more civil society organizations are calling for a repositioning of the financial sector. The idea is that banks will withdraw their investments from gas projects and place them in the development of renewable energies. But as noted by the NGO Reclaim Finance in its latest report, the major European banks, contrary to their public commitments, continue to invest massively in gas expansion, with the commissioning of new fields around the world and the construction of new infrastructures for the transport of this fossil hydrocarbon, particularly in the form of liquefied natural gas.
-” All The International Energy Agency has been telling us for several years now that we should not develop these projects if we want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.underlines Lucie Pinson, director of Reclaim Finance. “ And yet, European banks, despite their climate commitments, continue to provide them with strategic financial services which allow these companies to develop such projects”.
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Environmental regulations
For Frédérique Hache, director of the think tank Green Finance Observatorythe most effective tool for organizing the decline of fossil fuels, and therefore gas, are environmental regulations, texts which require the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of biodiversity. “ Because any regulation will have an impact on the expected future profits of the activities concerned. And therefore private investors will mechanically redirect their capital according to new profit expectations”.
Since May 2024, the European Union has required its member states to gradually replace fossil gas with renewable and low-carbon gases. All fossil gas purchase contracts must expire no later than 2049. In the meantime, this has not stopped the European Commission from granting the gas the ” green energy ».
