The European Parliament recently issued a directive to allow designation of certain projects involving natural gas and/or nuclear energy as “green”; or put another way, to not automatically label certain natural gas and nuclear energy projects as non-green. Certain proposed projects using natural gas as the fuel of choice or the building of nuclear power plants may be labelled “green” and “environmentally-friendly”, potentially qualifying them for hundreds of billions of euros in grants or subsidized loans. Perhaps, as important, this action gives cover for developers of some proposed projects which some may criticize as environmentally unfriendly or unfriendly for Climate Change impacting the Earth.

The EU, like the US, wishes to minimize “greenwashing”, the practice of exaggerating the positive environmental impacts of a project. The EU’s decision to allow certain projects using natural gas, a fossil fuel, to consider itself “environmentally friendly” and building a nuclear power plant to consider itself “sustainable” because it emits no or minimal greenhouse gases (GHGs) has led to much criticism from the European environmental community which wants to see the complete end of fossil fuel usage as soon as possible and the end of nuclear power as an option.

This decision by the EU was probably influenced by global politics, the aggressive effort to have Europe be independent as soon as possible from Russian oil and gas. If locally-produced natural gas can quickly replace oil (mainly from Russia), that is a good thing in the fighting in Ukraine. The problem is that natural gas is still a fossil fuel and emits GHGs. Once allowing such a project, it would be hard to displace it with a true sustainable replacement because of the initial investment in the natural gas technology. Same thing with nuclear power to generate electricity independent of Russian natural gas. The huge investment in a nuclear plant makes it difficult to pivot to a renewable, but non-nuclear replacement, soon after the war in Ukraine is over. The EU has drawn the line, however, with natural gas and nuclear power; non-Russian coal and Middle Eastern oil are not considered “green.”

CCES has the technical experts to help your US-based facility become truly more “green” and “sustainable” given sources available in the US and get incentives to partially pay the upfront costs. Likely save energy costs and reduce GHG emissions, too. Contact us today at 914-584-6720 or at karell@CCESworld.com.