The EU Energy Platform: From geopolitics to climate to geopolitics to climate...

The European Commission introduced the quickly developed AggregateEU platform to pool fossil gas demand, optimise infrastructure use, and facilitate external outreach in response to Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022. It offered a tool with which the bloc could undertake the joint purchasing of the fuel, reflecting the EU’s ambition to deploy its buying power in a tight market. It offered a step in aggregating demand and coordinating action that states had done on a bilateral basis or companies largely through market mechanisms and various contracts. Loosening supply constraints shifted emphasis to AggregateEU’s potential in helping implement the EU’s Methane Strategy and Methane Regulation by setting standards for imports; thus, incorporating climate policy considerations. More recently, it was discussed as a tool to assist the EU in procuring the LNG volumes promised to US President Trump—its geopolitical dimension became more pronounced once again. In parallel, an offshoot of the Energy Platform materialised as part of the Hydrogen Bank where a platform was developed to match hydrogen demand and supply, enabling the decarbonisation of difficult-to-electrify energy consumption. This paper explores how the Commission adapted the EU Energy Platform’s design to reflect a changing international (geo)political environment and policy priorities. The EU Energy Platform both coincides and reinforces a shift in the EU’s approach to energy politics, facilitating intra-EU cooperation while taking on a strategic approach vis-à-vis external suppliers. It marks reflects the Commission’s ambition to include strategic and environmental considerations, expanding and altering the EU’s market framework. Accordingly, it speaks to the literature theorising the drivers structuring EU’s energy market governance, drawing on approaches that emphasize the shift towards an interventionist form of market design, subjugating governance structures to various strategic goals. The Platform offers a case to trace these shifts, also providing insights on the tensions between the EU- and Member State-level in market governance. Volumes traded may be small, but it offered an innovative and successful policy tool that deviated from the EU’s typical approach to sourcing resources. To explore these dynamics, the paper traces the emergence and changing objectives of the EU Energy Platform in relation to a changing geopolitical and global/EU climate governance context between 2022–2025.