【调查】TotalEnergies官员与特朗普协调推迟欧盟甲烷规则

A TotalEnergies executive worked with US officials to delay the EU’s methane rules, raising questions over the company’s pledges to tackle leaks of the potent greenhouse gas.

DeSmog’s findings follow an investigation by EUobserver into US lobbying, as the EU now debates whether to delay the rules — originally due to come into force on 1 January 2027 — by either one or three years.

[Investigation] How the EU’s methane rules came undone, and ended up giving Trump exactly what he wanted

François-Régis Mouton, formerly vice-president of gas advocacy at TotalEnergies, has been seconded from the French oil giant since 2018 to the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP), a London-based fossil-fuel industry lobby group.

Mouton and the IOGP have coordinated industry-backed open letters and met dozens of times with policymakers in Brussels in a push to delay the EU Methane Regulation (EUMR) over the past 18 months.

The IOGP argues that the new methane rules for oil and gas importers are not yet clear enough, create legal risks for the industry and could harm the bloc’s energy security.

Mouton, who is IOGP’s Europe managing director, met with US officials on at least three occasions to discuss the EUMR, according to social media posts.

Trump administration officials regularly cited key IOGP talking points following these meetings, including in a 27 April op-ed published in the Financial Times and an email sent to EU member states on 20 October.

With a hard winter approaching and energy prices still painfully high – as even Energy Commissioner Jørgensen has warned—the Commission’s handling of the EU Methane Regulation (#EUMR) has failed to deliver the relief the moment requires.

In June, the Commission acknowledged the…
— Ambassador Andrew Puzder (@USAmbEU) November 4, 2026

The US has stepped in as Europe’s biggest supplier of fossil gas since the invasion of Ukraine prompted the bloc to seek alternatives to Russian supplies.

But the Trump administration and the fossil-fuel industry have ever since tried to gut key aspects of the EU’s climate plans — raising fears the industry may succeed in delaying the new methane rules indefinitely.

“Europe should be defending its citizens, not importing the politics of climate denial championed by the fossil-fuel lobby and the far-right,” said Laurence Tubiana, director of the European Climate Foundation.

François-Régis Mouton, formerly vice-president of gas advocacy at TotalEnergies, regularly shares and engages with anti-climate content on his social media (Source: IOGP Europe LinkedIn)

IOGP declined a DeSmog request to interview Mouton.

The group said in a statement that “we do not want to weaken the regulation’s objective to reduce methane emissions, and we do not want to scrap the regulation. On the contrary, we want a regulation which is efficient, proportionate and that we can actually comply with.”

Mouton regularly shares and engages with hard-right, anti-renewable energy and climate change-sceptic content on his personal social media, DeSmog found.

On Friday (6 November), the Council, representing EU member states, agreed with the commission’s proposal for a one-year delay. It will now have to negotiate the final decision with MEPs, which has voted for a three-year delay.

EU states back one-year methane delay, but leave door open for more

As of 29 October, Mouton was a member of three Facebook groups which are forums for questioning human-caused climate change, including one called “Climate Crisis is a Fraud!” In one Facebook post from August, Mouton said that “loads of CO2” was emitted in the Middle Ages and that current climate science was “so binary”. In January, he shared an extract from a speech by US president Donald Trump calling wind turbines “losers”.

The IOGP and Mouton did not respond to questions about Mouton’s personal social media activity. In a statement to DeSmog, the IOGP said it backed the EU’s climate goals and that it has “never sought to weaken the regulation’s objective and has never called for it to be scrapped.”

TotalEnergies said it “does not comment on the personal views or content shared on personal social media accounts by employees.”

The company did not respond to questions about its trade associations’ engagement with the EUMR and said it was calling for an approach that balanced “the implementation of the methane regulation with energy security.”

‘Corporate Double-Talk’

Methane is the main component of the natural gas that heats millions of homes around Europe. It has a heating effect on earth’s atmosphere more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years.

TotalEnergies has painted itself as an industry leader on methane action over the past decade. The company’s website states it supports “policies aimed at measuring and reducing methane emissions”, including the EUMR.

But climate advocates said the company’s support for Mouton and the IOGP raises questions about the French oil giant’s agenda.

In 2021, TotalEnergies quit the American Petroleum Institute (API), citing its opposition to methane regulation.

But TotalEnergies is still a member of 25 lobby groups including the IOGP that have worked to delay or weaken the EUMR proposals, according to a DeSmog analysis of lobbying registers, TotalEnergies’ public disclosures, and meeting notes obtained via freedom of information requests.

TotalEnergies holds a leadership role — such as a board position — in 13 of the 25 groups identified. It paid between €5.3m and €9.8m in combined membership fees to these groups in 2024, according to the analysis.

“TotalEnergies talks about tackling methane emissions, but its lobbying tells a very different story,” said Kim Claes, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe. “This is corporate double-talk: promising climate action in public while working behind closed doors to undermine it.”

TotalEnergies imported twice as much US liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe and the UK as any other company between 2021 and 2025, according to climate researchers at Oil Change International.

TotalEnergies was the only European company present in a March 2025 meeting where EU officials and a group of US fossil fuel companies and lobbies including ExxonMobil and the API discussed the EUMR, according to meeting notes obtained via FOI by climate research group ARIA and shared with DeSmog.

Climate advocates have long warned that the fossil fuel industry prefers voluntary initiatives which can be used to undermine the need for regulation.

In 2022, François-Régis Mouton told IOGP members it had begun publishing industry methane emissions reporting “so we can show what we’re doing,” according to a members report from 2022 obtained by DeSmog.

“Methane is a question of credibility for gas in Europe,” said Mouton in the memo. “This issue affects our license to operate.”

‘Breath of fresh air’

At an event in Brussels in September 2025, Mouton told US energy secretary Chris Wright he was a “breath of fresh air” after Wright said the proposed EUMR should be “fixed”, according to media reports.

The following month, Mouton briefed a Trump administration initiative known as the National Energy Dominance Council on how they could “work together to address and remove regulatory barriers such as…the #EUMethaneRegulation,” according to LinkedIn posts by Mouton and the Council’s executive director Jarrod Agen.

In November 2025, Brittany Kelm, a then colleague of Agen’s at the National Energy Dominance Council, tagged Mouton and the IOGP in a LinkedIn post celebrating a vote by the European Parliament to weaken proposed new regulations known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Kelm described it as a “great step forward in progress on EU regulation changes for US LNG!” before adding: “Now onto the EU Methane Reg….”

“Indeed, let’s move forward,” Mouton replied.

Fossil fuel industry is using crisis politics to gut EU methane law

Mouton met with the US ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder in March 2026, according to an Instagram post from the ambassador’s official account. The following month, the Financial Times’ op-ed by Puzder, headlined “The EU’s methane regulation could spark an energy crisis”, cited an IOGP-coordinated call for delays and amendments to the EUMR.

IOGP listed “Keeping energy security at the centre of EU debates” as one of the “highlights” of its 2026 lobbying activity in an October presentation obtained by DeSmog meant for prospective new-joiners to the group. The same document listed “30+ targeted media placements” as part of its lobbying strategy on the EUMR.

The same month, the IOGP and FuelsEurope — another TotalEnergies-backed trade group — funded a study published by analysts at Wood Mackenzie in March which concluded the EUMR “risks worsening the energy crisis” caused by the war in Iran and between Russia and Ukraine.

In June, Wright, the US energy secretary, co-signed an open letter with the energy ministers of Qatar, Algeria and Nigeria to the EU asking for the regulation to be halted, citing an “independent, comprehensive industry analysis” that had found “significant negative supply and price impacts are a certainty.”

Research by the European Commission and Rystad Energy has concluded that there are sufficient supplies of compliant gas available to fulfil Europe’s energy needs next year.

“The gas industry has consistently exaggerated the threat the EU Methane Regulation poses to Europe’s gas supply,” said Sam Leon, co-founder of climate research group DataDesk.

On 3 September, Puzder posted an IOGP open letter on X calling for a three-year delay, signed by 22 other trade groups.

US civil society groups call on EU not to delay methane rules

The IOPG’s calls for a three-year delay then intensified when the European Commission began signalling that it may delay the rules following an 18 September call by embattled French president Emmanuel Macron for a one-year delay.

Mouton said in an IOPG statement on 2 October a one-year delay would see the EU “return to the same problem 12 months from now.” Puzder echoed this language in the 20 October email to EU member states encouraging them to vote for a three-year delay.

“Do we really want to go through all this again next year and the year after?” Puzder said in the email, which was seen by DeSmog.

Screenshot of Mouton’s LinkedIn post published on Thursday 5 November, ahead of a key meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels (Source: LinkedIn)

“The commission’s own findings say the methane regulation poses no threat to our security of supply, yet it is about to delay it anyway because Paris, the gas industry and Washington asked loudly enough,” said French Greens MEP Marie Toussaint.

Asked by DeSmog whether the US wants to “remove” the EUMR, the US Mission to the European Union said this was “a decision for the EU” and “our immediate focus is a three-year delay in implementation.”

It added that the administration believes “deregulation improves economic competitiveness.”

This investigation is a co-publication with DeSmog

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