Recovery and Resilience Facility funding for gas projects

ClientEarth urges EU decision-makers to prohibit the use of Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) funds for gas-reliant projects, asserting that such investments would breach the Paris Agreement and EU legal obligations. The document argues that gas is not a viable 'bridge fuel' due to methane leakages and that existing infrastructure overcapacity makes new investments a stranded asset risk.

• Allowing the RRF to fund gas and fossil fuel projects would be inconsistent with the emission reductions and clean energy investments required by the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal, putting Member States in breach of EU legal obligations.
• Under Paris-compliant 1.5°C scenarios, the European Commission's modelling indicates that the share of gas in the energy mix should fall to below 20% by 2030 and approximately 3% by 2050.
• Gas cannot be considered a 'bridge fuel' because it is highly polluting and unnecessary; specifically, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transmission lead to significant greenhouse gas emissions.
• New gas infrastructure investments pose a high risk of becoming stranded assets because the EU already has significant infrastructure overcapacity, importing less than half of the gas it has the capacity to import.
• The RRF's current proposed law lacks sufficient safeguards to prevent fossil fuel developments, and funding such projects would divert critical resources from the energy transformation needed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

APA

ClientEarth (2020). Recovery and Resilience Facility funding for gas projects. https://www.clientearth.org/media/qwrnvmif/letter-to-budg-econ-committee-members-re-rrf-gas-funding.pdf

Chicago

ClientEarth. Recovery and Resilience Facility funding for gas projects. 2020. https://www.clientearth.org/media/qwrnvmif/letter-to-budg-econ-committee-members-re-rrf-gas-funding.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite press release |author=ClientEarth |title=Recovery and Resilience Facility funding for gas projects |date=6 November 2020 |url=https://www.clientearth.org/media/qwrnvmif/letter-to-budg-econ-committee-members-re-rrf-gas-funding.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@misc{clientearth2020recovery, author = {{ClientEarth}}, title = {{Recovery and Resilience Facility funding for gas projects}}, publisher = {ClientEarth}, year = {2020}, month = nov, url = {https://www.clientearth.org/media/qwrnvmif/letter-to-budg-econ-committee-members-re-rrf-gas-funding.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }