(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) A top EU energy official has stressed that the 28-member European bloc is keen in boosting its energy cooperation with the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
"The growing political and economic importance of the Gulf states in regional and global issues in our view is very important to understand as the reasons why we need to develop more deeper an and structured relationship between the EU and the Gulf countries," said Hans Van Steen, head of unit responsible for international relations and enlargement at the Directorate General of Energy in the European Commission.
He was speaking at a meeting of the delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula in the European Parliament Thursday evening on EU-GCC energy cooperation.
"For us in Europe, prosperity and security hinges very much on stable and abundant and affordable supply of energy from third countries. That is one of the reasons why our partnership with the Gulf Cooperation Council and the countries of the Gulf are so important because this is where the largest hydrocarbon producing area in the world and it is of course strategically very important for the EU," he stressed.
He noted that the EU has already, since many years, a very active delegation in Riyadh and opened in 2013 a delegation in Abu Dhabi "which is a clear signal of the growing importance that the EU is giving to its relations with the Gulf countries and as energy partners." Van Steen said the Gulf region is a very important trade partner for the EU and a lot of this trade is to do with energy, noting that the Gulf region holds approximately 40 percent of the world's proven oil resources and a quarter of the world's proven gas reserves.
"Some people rightly call this as the central bank of oil," he remarked.
"Oil and gas are one of the key reasons why we build up this relation in the first place. But we are not reducing our relations with these countries just to hydrocarbon. We succeeded in expanding our cooperation also in other areas such as energy technology and innovation, clean energy, renewable energy, energy efficiency and sustainable use of natural gas," he said.
He pointed out that the EU and GCC have developed an expert group devoted to energy and the last meeting took place in January in Riyadh. The group is expected to meet in Brussels at the end of this year.
The official said gas is the area where the EU is most vulnerable because of the infrastructure required for the industry. For the Gulf region, the gas that comes to the EU only comes in the form of LNG mainly from Qatar.
In 2010, the EU and GCC launched the clean energy network, which aims at facilitating cooperation in the energy sector.
"The EU energy import bill in 2013 was around EUR 400 billion," he said, explaining that the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and the tension in ties between the West and Russia have been reminded of "our vulnerability of our energy dependency," and added that Russia is also using energy as one element in its overall European strategy, which the EU considers not acceptable.
As a response to that the EU adopted in May 2014 the European energy security strategy and this will be adopted by the European Parliament in June. It is equally important to look at the supply side as the demand side, he said.
Van Steen said that the top priority of the current President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, is to create an energy union in the EU.
As part of its revitalised energy diplomacy, the EU will use all its foreign policy instruments to establish strategic partnerships with increasingly important producing transit countries and regions such as Algeria, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan while the Middle East is outlined as an area to further build and strengthen our energy relations, he said.
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