Press Release March 14th 2018:

EU Parliament breaching its own SEA Directive by approving EU Energy Programme of Projects of Common Interest (PCI)   without any Environmental Assessment or consideration of reasonable alternatives.

- PCI Directive states that All Projects on the PCI list must be "allocated the status of highest national significance possible" and that "authorisation should be given to projects which have an adverse impact on the environment for reasons of overriding public interest"

- door opened for legal challenge

Today, the EU parliament is taking part in a sleight of hand which will legally force EU members to accept massive gas infrastructure projects (such as the proposed Shannon LNG project in Ireland), where all adverse impacts on climate change and impacts on the environment will have to be ignored for reasons of overriding public interest. No environmental screening report of this plan is being presented to Parliament before it votes on this plan - the first time ever the EU Parliament gets to  approve the Energy Programme of Projects of Common Interest (PCI) -  a clear breach of the EU SEA Directive.
We believe this is taking place to help the EU Commission avoid having to  live up to the Global Paris Climate Agreement that the EU ratified in 2016 by not considering "reasonable alternatives" as obliged under the SEA Directive.


Article 2 of the SEA Directive clearly states that " 'plans and programmes' shall mean plans and programmes, including those co-financed by the European Community, as well as any modifications to them".

Article 4(1) of the SEA Directive states that "The environmental assessment referred to in Article 3 shall be carried out during the preparation of a plan or programme and before its adoption or submission to the legislative procedure".

Article 5 of the SEA Directive obliges the environmental assessment to consider "reasonable alternatives" to the plan.

By not considering the overall environmental impact of the PCI plan in its globality with all the combined projects in the plan (especially the gas projects grouped together) environmental assessment of individual split projects within the plan when they are going through the permitting process is meaningless  - especially since the PCI Directive forces national planning authorities to ignore all these environmental concerns because the projects must be considered to be in "the public interest".

The PCI Directive Article 7(3) clearly states "projects of common interest shall be allocated the status of the highest national significance possible and be treated as such in permit granting processes".
Article 7(8) goes on to state "With regard to the environmental impacts addressed in Article 6(4) of Directive 92/43/EEC and Article 4(7) of Directive 2000/60/EC, projects of common interest shall be considered as being of public interest from an energy policy perspective and may be considered as being of overriding public interest, provided that all the conditions set out in these Directives are fulfilled".


We believe that the first ever approval of the PCI list by the EU parliament without any environmental report or consideration of reasonable alternatives has left the door open for legal challenge.