Qatar’s won’t be able to supply LNG to Europe over EU’s sustainability law, says energy minister

Dubai: Qatar will not be able to do business in the EU, including supplying Europe with LNG to plug its energy gap, if further changes are not made to its corporate sustainability rules, Qatar’s energy minister Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters on Thursday.

Qatar, one of the world’s top liquified natural gas exporters, has argued that the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive (CSDDD) adopted in 2024, poses a significant risk to state-owned QatarEnergy.

The EU rule requires larger companies operating in the EU to find and fix human rights and environmental issues in their supply chains or face financial penalties.

This week, the European Parliament’s legal committee backed plans to water down the law, having faced pushback from companies, but Kaabi said the changes did not address key concerns.

Kaabi, who is also the chief executive of QatarEnergy, told Reuters his concern centres on the potential for fines of up to 5% of total global revenue for companies that do not have climate change transition plans aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of preventing global warming exceeding 1.5 Celsius.

Qatar supplies between 12% and 14% of Europe’s LNG since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. QatarEnergy has long-term supply contracts with Britain’s Shell, France’s TotalEnergies and Italy’s ENI.

“We have been seeking to constructively engage with the key players at both the European Commission and every EU Member State for almost a year now on CSDDD,” Kaabi said, adding that the Commission had not responded.

There was no immediate reply to a Reuters request for comment from the EU Commission.

Europe must decide if it wants to continue to attract investment into the bloc by further changing CSDDD, or risk undermining efforts to strengthen its competitiveness and prevent economic deterioration, Kaabi told Reuters.

“QatarEnergy will not be able to justify doing business in the EU, be it in LNG or other products, due to the significant risk it would be exposed to due to the overreaching nature of the proposed regulations, which will ultimately harm the European end consumers,”

he said.