site.btaParliament's Energy Committee Approves Amendments to Oil and Petroleum Products Stocks Act at First Reading

Parliament's Energy Committee approved Wednesday at first reading a bill amending and supplementing the Crude Oil and Petroleum Products Stocks Act. The bill was submitted by the Council of Ministers on May 7.

Dennitsa Kabakchieva, Director of the Administrative-Legal Services and European Coordination Directorate at the State Reserve and War-Time Stocks Agency, said the Agency maintains several registers, including emergency stocks, mandatory stocks, obligated entities, and registered storage facilities for mandatory stocks.

Following amendments to the Electronic Government Act in late 2023, all government bodies that maintain official registers are now required to digitize them. Kabakchieva noted that all data will be publicly accessible, with the exception of the exact location of stocks. This data does not constitute classified information and is currently available upon request.

Svetoslav Benchev, Chair of the Bulgarian Petroleum and Gas Association (BPGA), said the law is rarely amended, but significant issues remain unresolved. According to him, two major problems persist. The first is that a considerable number of entities fail to meet their obligations for maintaining oil stocks. In this regard, BPGA plans to submit two proposals aimed at addressing the issue, including the potential revocation of licenses for fuel trading and tax warehouses in cases of non-compliance.

The second issue, Benchev said, concerns the excessive regulatory burden on businesses. The Association will propose easing requirements for economic operators. One such suggestion is to allow the transfer of quantities between tanks within the same storage facility without prior notification to the Association’s chairperson, but with subsequent reporting. "Nothing will change, the data is available in real time anyway, at any given moment. But this would ease the burden significantly for a large part of the business," Benchev noted.

The proposals will be submitted between the first and second reading of the bill.