Romania: legislative developments with immediate business relevance in the energy sector

A legislative proposal registered in Parliament seeks to extend the scope of Law No. 185/2016 on projects of national importance in the gas sector to underground gas storage infrastructure.

The initiative explicitly includes storage facilities, associated installations and storage wells within the special procedural regime currently applied mainly to gas transmission projects.

The proposal also introduces provisions on land access, extended validity of construction permits and limits on the suspension of works for projects covered by the law.

The proposal would extend the accelerated procedural regime for strategic gas infrastructure to storage projects, potentially reducing administrative delays linked to permitting, land access and litigation.

For storage operators and infrastructure developers, the initiative signals a regulatory direction focused on facilitating the development and modernization of gas storage capacity.

The proposal will now enter the parliamentary legislative process, including committee review and votes in both chambers.

The Ministry of Environment published a draft order amending the methodology governing the return of forest land temporarily removed from the national forest fund for oil and gas extraction activities.

The proposal clarifies that the land restitution procedure may be completed without the surface associated with extraction wellheads that cannot be physically removed or buried.

For the remaining surfaces associated with these installations, operators would need to obtain a new approval for temporary occupation of forest land.

Oil and gas operators: The change addresses a narrow but concrete administrative blockage that can delay closure or regularisation of land occupation arrangements.

Land and permitting teams: The proposal creates a clearer procedural route for cases where full technical restoration is not possible in practice.

Although limited in scope, the measure matters because it targets an operational bottleneck rather than a theoretical legislative gap.

The draft order is currently subject to the public consultation procedure before potential adoption by the Ministry of Environment.

A legislative initiative proposes allowing the reopening of industrial waste deposits that were previously closed where these sites contain critical raw materials or other resources that may be economically recovered.

Reopening such deposits would require the preparation of technical documentation and would remain subject to environmental approval and environmental authorization procedures.

The proposal aims to create a legal framework enabling the recovery of valuable materials from previously closed industrial sites.

Operators and industrial asset owners: The proposal could create a new legal basis for assessing closed sites as potential secondary resource assets rather than purely post-closure liabilities.

Critical raw materials and industrial policy stakeholders: The initiative links Romanian waste legislation more directly to the EU agenda on strategic resource security.

The measure remains early-stage, but it introduces an identifiable policy direction toward domestic recovery of strategic materials.

The legislative proposal will proceed through the parliamentary legislative process.

The adopted 2026 state budget includes allocations intended to support reimbursement payments to energy suppliers under the electricity and gas price-capping scheme.

However, the level of funding appears insufficient compared with the stock of unpaid compensation claims accumulated under the mechanism.

According to publicly referenced data from the Federation of Associations of Energy Utility Companies (ACUE), reimbursement claims submitted by suppliers had reached approximately RON 9.5 billion by January 2026, while effective payment arrears were estimated at around RON 6 billion.

This suggests that the backlog of compensation payments may continue to persist despite the allocations included in the 2026 budget.

Payments will continue through the reimbursement mechanism managed by the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Labour, depending on the validation of claims and available budget allocations.