Fuels, Senate approves the decree. Powers extended to drilling commissioner

Thirty-eight practices to search for and extract hydrocarbons on land await the green light from the Regions. In the worst cases the wait reaches nine years from the submission of the application. The objective of the legislative decree launched on 10 September 2026 and just approved by the Senate is to unblock them: the text now passes to the Chamber, which must convert it into law by 9 November.

The heart of the provision is article 2, prepared by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security. It works like this: if the Region does not give the agreement within 45 days of the request, Palazzo Chigi sets a peremptory deadline for it, on the proposal of the minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin. The deadline is 60 days maximum and drops to 30 for projects linked to gas release, the mechanism designed to sell gas at a controlled price to energy-intensive industries and which never took off. In the meantime, the Government checks with the Region the reasons for the delay, but the deadlines continue to run. If the Region remains firm, the Council of Ministers hears it and then exercises the substitutive powers. He then appoints an ad acta commissioner, possibly supported by a sub-commissioner, who gives the agreement in place of the administration. Both work without compensation or reimbursement.

In the Environment Committee, an amendment by Claudio Fazzone (Fi) gave more powers to the commissioner. It will also be able to adopt the intermediate documents and authorizations under the jurisdiction of the Region or local authorities necessary to close the procedure.

The files, as reported in the Sole 24 Ore on 12 September, are still 10 permits and 28 concessions. The permits include 8 new releases and 2 extensions. The concessions include 27 extensions and a change in work programmes. National production is far from past levels. In the first four months of the year, according to Mase, Italy extracted 926 million cubic meters of gas and 1.2 million tonnes of oil. In the 1990s there were 20 billion cubic meters of gas and 4-5 million tonnes of crude oil per year. For Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, increasing domestic production means "reducing dependence on foreign countries".

The commission approved a few other amendments. The most significant concerns Arera, which by reviewing the conditions for connections to the electricity grid will have to reduce the power quota contributions. The other contributions, including the distance quota, will be remodulated accordingly, without changing the overall revenue for distributors and "without increases in system costs borne by end users". The declared objective is to encourage the electrification of consumption envisaged by the Pniec. The majority proposal was passed in the reformulated version after the conditional opinion of the Budget Commission.