Live Debate: Mutual dependence: securing Europe’s energy supply

Date: Monday 27 April 2009
Location: European Parliament – Room ASP 3E2 Rue Wiertz 60, Brussels

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Debate Highlights Video

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Post Debate Interviews

Charles Watson Interview

Jan Haizmann Interview

Alexander Krestiyanov Interview

Viacheslav Kniazhnytskyi Interview

Jacques de Selliers Interview

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Dana Spinant: To my right, I have Mr Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, an MEP and Chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. Mr Saryusz-Wolski is also the host of this evening’s debate. I thank you for this, I’m very grateful. We have the pleasure to have with us Mr Alexander Krestiyanov who is the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the European Union; welcome Mr Krestiyanov. Mr Volkan Bozkir who is the Turkish Ambassador to the European Union, welcome, and Mr Fabrizio Barbaso who is the European Commission’s Deputy Director General for Energy and Transport in charge, among others, of security of energy supply.

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski MEP:

First, the European Union should speak with one voice. So the European Union vis-à-vis supply in transit countries should act as a single unity.

Volkan Bozkir: The challenge today is to guarantee affordable and uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbon resources from the Caspian region and the Middle East to energy consuming markets. Located at the crossroads of around 70% of the world’s proven oil and natural gas resources, Turkey constitutes a natural bridge in relation to both the East-West and the North-South energy corridors.

Fabrizio Barbaso: No single country can ensure alone its energy security. That’s why we believe at the EU level that we have to address the energy security challenge within the European Union dimension. We have a big market. We have the right size to address this. We have developed technologies and we have a tradition of international cooperation which allows us to set up a number of agreements, contracts, partnerships, memoranda with third countries.

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski MEP: The general objective should be to treat energy as a commodity not as an instrument of political pressure or whatever. So let me recall because I just wanted to compliment the Director-General’s position that in the mandate by the Council to the Commission to negotiate the PCA, in essence, the principles of an Energy Charter should be included in the new PCA, and you know how the discussion in the Council was around this. The tendency was to have as much as possible so if you asked the question, what should we change? I’d say as little as possible.

Alexander Krestyanov: I wouldn’t say that the Energy Charter Treaty is a 100% bad. I would say even that for 95% the Energy Charter is good but the January crisis proved to us that this treaty couldn’t help us to solve this crisis, and that means that there are some problems with this treaty inherent to this treaty; and these problems should be resolved. The proposals of the Russian President, Mr Medvedev, are aimed to solve these problems, to make the new treaty automatically applied not only in times of crisis but in times of peace.

Question from audience: Rightly or wrongly, it was my impression that the Europeans were reaching out or looking in the other direction across the Mediterranean to deal directly with Nigeria and Algeria. We also have the energy, we have the gas, we have the oil to sell. Are we going to wait until when there is a third crisis before we are approached formally as to how to go about it?

Dana Spinant: Why are we not looking across the Mediterranean? Who wants to answer? Mr Saryusz-Wolski.

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski MEP: I just want to say that in our report, we mentioned the Trans-Saharan and Nigeria as one of the resources, as much as, if political conditions permit, Libya. So we should take from all possible directions in order to be the least dependent. If tomorrow everybody will be bound by those market principles and third party excess, we can buy 100% from one supplier. I don’t think it is rational to expect that. I don’t think that it is rational to expect that those who have quasi-monopolies [??? 5:00] take whatever position. In supplying and in transit terms, they will not use their power, as long as the conditions, the environment will not be competitive.

Alexander Krestyanov: Europe needs gas. Russia has this gas. Europe wants to buy gas. Russia wants to sell gas. So Europe take that gas.

Fabrizio Barbaso: Ideally, many other sectors having to go for an overall agreement including suppliers, consumers and transit countries appears as the best solution on paper but is it?

Dana Spinant: Is it feasible?

Fabrizio Barbaso: Exactly, this is the question. Is it feasible? Is it available in the short term or do we take too long before reaching a useful outcome? So that’s why sometimes we have to turn to solutions which look more workable, like bilateral agreements.

Charles Watson: I like to think and it focuses my mind about what I call the cold-cold scenario; that’s two years when it’s cold in Russia, very cold, historically cold and very cold in Europe. Do your sums on that and figure out what it means. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time. My general encouragement then is let’s have the broad sweeping discussions but at the same time, and in a sense even faster, let’s translate the political debate into the practicalities for practitioners like Shell and many other folk in the European market to deal with the relationship between the very short run – some people are trading on the half hour, on the hour – to the very long run where projects take, as we’ve discussed, 20 / 30 years to put together and cost what? For big projects these days, 10, 20, 30, 40 billion dollars a piece. That’s all I wanted to say – thank you very much indeed.

Event Information

This, the latest in the Comment:Visions series of debates, is dedicated to a topic that many Europeans were made all too physically aware of this January: energy (in)security. The dispute between Russia and Ukraine, which left parts of Europe without gas in the middle of a harsh winter, was a reminder of just how dependent Europe is on the outside world for its energy.

Can Europe actually afford to do without supplies of Russian gas? Are there alternatives, and if so, what are they? What legal guarantees should the EU seek in international agreements? What infrastructure projects should the EU support? Should the EU ease foreign companies’ access to its energy market in order to build confidence with supplier countries? Is interdependence the solution to securing Europe’s energy future?

These are just some of the questions that the panel and a select audience of politicians, officials, businesspeople and experts will have an opportunity to discuss on 27 April in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Event Panel/Moderator

Charles Watson

Charles is a British National who holds a degree in Civil Engineering and a MBA (Insead)

He joined Shell in 1982 having worked in Algeria and Saudi Arabia on Gas projects. After several Development and Managerial positions internationally in 1997 he became Vice President Exploration and Development Middle East followed by the position of Executive Vice President Shell Gas and Power Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

In November 2007 he was appointed Executive Vice President of Shell Energy Europe B.V., the business organization responsible for managing and developing Shell’s Gas & Power in Europe, Russia and Central Asia. He is a non-executive Director of Sakhalin Energy (LNG). He is based in The Hague.

Charles is married with two children.

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski MEP

Jacek Saryusz-Wolski is the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He is the head of the Polish delegation to the centre-right group of the Eurpean People’s Party - European Democrats. He is also a member of the EU-Russia parliamentary cooperation committee.

Born in 1948, in Łódż, Poland, Saryusz-Wolski studied economics at the University of Łódż (masters, 1971) and University of Nancy (postgraduate studies 1972-73). After obtaining a doctorate in Economics from the University of Łódż (1980), he started an academic career as an associate professor at the institute of economics of the same university.

In the years between his graduation and the fall of the Iron Curtain, he also visited a number of western universities (Lyon, Grenoble, Oxford, Edinburgh and Paris) as a guest lecturer and researcher. In 1988, he was appointed director of the centre for European studies of the University of Łódż and in 1989, he became a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

His involvement in the Solidarnosc movement in the 1980s led him into politics after the change of regime, and in 1991 he became Poland’s minister for European affairs for the first time. He kept this position for five years, despite frequent changes in government.

In 1997, he returned to the academic world as the vice-rector of the College of Europe (Bruges and Natolin), a position he held for two years.

In 1999 he was appointed chief adviser on European integration to the Prime Minister. In 2000, he was again appointed minister of European Affairs, and played an important role in the negotiation of the Nice treaty.

In 2004, he was elected to the European Parliament.

Volkan Bozkir

Volkan Bozkir is Turkey’s Ambassador to the European Union. He was appointed to that post in December 2005.

Born in 1950, he graduated from the faculty of law of Ankara University in 1971. A career diplomat, he started working for the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs in 1972.

He spent over 20 years abroad, and was posted to Germany (1975-78), Iraq (1978-80), Paris (OECD, 1982-86), New York (1989-92), and Bucharest, where he served as ambassador (1996-2000).

He was a foreign policy advisor in the office of Prime Minister Turgut Özal (1987-89). In 1992, Özal, who had since been elected president, asked him to become his chief of cabinet and chief foreign policy adviser. He kept the same position under the next president, Süleyman Demirel, until 1996.

On his return from Romania in 2000, he became deputy secretary-general for EU affairs (political affairs), before becoming deputy under-secretary at the Ministry of foreign affairs in 2003.

Alexander Krestyanov

Alexander Krestiyanov is the deputy head of the mission of the Russian Federation to the European Union, with the rank of extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister-counsellor.

Born in 1954 in Moscow, he studied law and international relations at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He specialized in international trade law and civil law, and followed a special legal course at the USSR Academy of International Trade in 1985. In 1993 he followed a special trade policy course at the GATT Secretariat in Geneva.

He started his political career in 1976 at the ministry of international trade of the USSR, as a legal expert and adviser. From 1984 to 1988 he led the Soviet law section of the ministry’s legal department.

His first foreign appointment came in 1988, as a senior legal adviser to the trade representation of the USSR/Russian Federation in France.

He returned to Moscow in 1992, to become the deputy head of the legal department of the Russian ministry of foreign economic relations. In 1994, he was appointed chief counsellor in the department of economic cooperation at the ministry of foreign affairs, before becoming the deputy director in 1996.

In 2000, as he was appointed Counsellor at Russia’s Embassy to Belgium.

In 2004, he was appointed deputy director of the department of economic cooperation at the Russian ministry of foreign affairs, a position he held until 2008.

Fabrizio Barbaso

Fabrizio Barbaso is the European Commission’s deputy director-general for transport and energy in charge of the coordination of the energy policy, a position he has been holding since 2006.

Born in Torino, he studied law, then started his professional activities working for a multinational group in Italy. He joined the European Commission in 1976, and occupied several positions in the services in charge of internal market and industry. He worked for nine years directly with two Italian Commissioners in various capacities in their cabinets before heading the unit in charge of textile, clothes, furniture, leather and footwear in the internal market department.

On 1 November 1997, he was appointed director in the department of external relations dealing with the countries of Southern Europe (including the Balkans), the European Economic Area and Switzerland.

Between October 2000 and August 2003, he was in charge of market policies as deputy director-general in the department of agriculture.

Between September 2003 and December 2005, he was acting director-general for enlargement, at the time when ten countries joined the European Union.

Dana Spinant

Dana Spinant has been editor of European Voice since February 2004, having joined the newspaper as deputy editor in September 2002. Before that she spent two years as co-editor of the Brussels-based news service EUobserver.com. As well as working for European Voice, Dana is the EU correspondent of Realitatea, a Romanian TV news channel. Before coming to Brussels, Dana was editor-in-chief at the news department of Antena 1 TV, in Bucharest.

She started her journalistic career at TV5-TV Sigma in 1992. Dana studied journalism and communication sciences at the University of Bucharest. She obtained two masters degrees, from the Institut Européen des Hautes Etudes Internationales (Nice) and the College of Europe (Bruges).

She speaks Romanian, French, English, German and some Spanish.

Tags: Biofuels Alternative energies Energy Environment, Energy, Energy Security, Society and Sustainability
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