To the European External Action Service,

Pursuant to Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, I request access to documents held by the EEAS, including by the EU Delegation to the United States in Washington, D.C., concerning contacts with U.S. public authorities and private stakeholders on:

- the EU Methane Regulation, including its import-related provisions, implementation, interpretation, equivalence, reporting, enforcement, or possible delay, adjustment or exemption; and
- the Vertical Corridor, including references to that infrastructure or related projects under the names “Vertical Corridor”, “Vertical Gas Corridor”, or “Trump Peace Pipelines”, insofar as the documents concern gas infrastructure, LNG supply routes, interconnectors, regasification, transmission expansion, or policy support intended to increase gas supplies to the EU or to South-East and Central Europe.

Date range:

From 1 March 2025 to the date on which the search is carried out.

Please include documents concerning contacts with, from, or referring to, in particular:

- the U.S. Department of Energy;
- the U.S. Department of State;
- the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency;
- the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA);
- LNG Allies;
- the Center for LNG / Centre of LNG;
- ExxonMobil
- Venture Global;
- and any other LNG, fossil gas, or pipeline industry association or company, but only where the contact concerned one of the two subjects identified above.

Please include the following categories of documents:

- correspondence, including emails and attachments;
- meeting requests, agendas, invitations, participant lists, minutes, notes, readouts, and speaking points;
- internal summaries, debriefs, flash reports, situation reports, and briefing notes prepared after such contacts;
- documents exchanged with EEAS headquarters, the Commission, or EU Member State representations, where held by the EEAS, that summarise or relay what the above actors communicated to the EU Delegation in Washington on these subjects.

To facilitate the search, relevant keywords may include:

“methane regulation”, “methane”, “import requirements”, “equivalence”, “methane intensity”, “MRV”, “Vertical Corridor”, “Vertical Gas Corridor”, “Trump Peace Pipelines”, “LNG”, “gas infrastructure”, “interconnector”, “DOE”, “EPA”, “State Department”, “USTDA”, “LNG Allies”, “Center for LNG”, "ExxonMobil", “Centre of LNG”, and “Venture Global”.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not seeking all documents on LNG or fossil gas more generally, but only documents concerning the two subject matters identified above.
If this request is considered too broad, please assist me in reaching a fair solution under Article 6(2) and 6(3) of Regulation 1049/2001, rather than rejecting it outright. In particular, you may prioritise:
- documents held by the EU Delegation in Washington;
- meeting records, correspondence, and briefings;
- and documents involving the named U.S. public authorities and named private actors.

If any document originates from a third party, please carry out the consultation foreseen by Article 4(4) of Regulation 1049/2001.

If access is refused in whole or in part, please grant partial access pursuant to Article 4(6) and provide a document-by-document list of withheld material, indicating for each item its date, type, sender, recipient, subject, and the specific legal basis relied upon.

I prefer to receive the documents in electronic format.

Applicant details:

Mr. Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado
Formentera Street, 15, 1st plant, door B
43205 Reus, Tarragona
Spain

Kind regards,

Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado

Dear EEAS Access to Documents Team,

Thank you for your message and for inviting me to clarify the scope of my application under Article 6(2) of Regulation 1049/2001.

To facilitate your search, I would like to narrow my request as follows.

My main interest is in documents that contain references to:

1. methane, and
2. the Vertical Corridor / Vertical Gas Corridor,

with particular interest in documents that also refer to the US or Israel.

I therefore limit my request to documents held by the EEAS that meet both of the following criteria:

* the document contains a reference to methane, methane regulation, methane intensity, methane emissions, or methane MRV; and
* the same or other documents contain a reference to the Vertical Corridor or Vertical Gas Corridor.

Within that narrowed set of documents, I am particularly interested in documents that also contain references to:

* the US / United States / U.S.; and/or
* Israel.

To further reduce the administrative burden, I limit the request to the following categories of documents:

* correspondence, including emails and attached letters;
* meeting agendas, meeting requests, briefings, minutes, readouts, or notes;
* non-papers, talking points, briefing notes, and reports.

I exclude broad searches based solely on the other keywords listed in my original application unless they appear in documents that also match the core focus described above.

For the purposes of this clarified request, please search only for documents dated between 1 October 2025 and 3 June 2026.

If this clarified scope is still considered too broad, please apply the request in the following order of priority:

1. documents containing both “methane” and “Vertical Corridor” / “Vertical Gas Corridor”;
2. among those, documents that also contain “Israel”;
3. among those, documents that also contain “US”, “United States”, or “U.S.”;
4. in particular, correspondence and briefing documents.

If necessary to reach a fair solution, you may in a first step limit the search to documents exchanged with third parties and to documents prepared by EEAS services dealing with energy, climate, or external economic relations.

Please register and process my clarified request on that basis.

Kind regards,

Mr. Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado
Formentera Street, 15, 1st plant, door B
43205 Reus, Tarragona
Spain

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your message.

I would like to clarify that my request is already limited in substance to documents containing information regarding the "Vertical Corridor".

That is the core subject of the request. References to methane, Israel and the United States were included only as possible contextual elements that may appear in documents concerning the Vertical Corridor; they were not intended as separate and cumulative search categories.

Accordingly, I ask the EEAS to carry out the search on the basis of the following limitation:

- documents in which the Vertical Corridor is the main subject, or a substantial subject, including in the context of energy cooperation, gas supply, or related exchanges with third countries.

This should provide a sufficiently clear and workable basis for the search. Under Article 6(2) and 6(3) of Regulation 1049/2001, where an institution considers that a request needs clarification or concerns a large number of documents, it must assist the applicant and seek a fair solution, rather than require an unduly restrictive reformulation.

I therefore trust that the EEAS will now proceed with the search on that basis.

Yours faithfully,

Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your message.

In order to facilitate the search, I would like to narrow my request to:

Documents held by the EEAS, dated between 1 October 2025 and 26 June 2026, in which the Vertical Corridor is discussed in exchanges with U.S. authorities or representatives, where the subject is political, diplomatic, financial or investment-related support for the Vertical Corridor.

To facilitate the search further, I limit the document types to:

correspondence,
meeting requests,
agendas,
briefing notes,
minutes,
readouts,
notes for the file,
and follow-up notes.

For the avoidance of doubt, this includes documents concerning support for the development, expansion, promotion or financing of the Vertical Corridor.

I trust that this limitation provides a sufficiently precise basis for the identification of documents under Article 6 of Regulation 1049/2001.

Yours faithfully,
Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado

Dear EEAS ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS,

I agree with this framework for search and kindly request to proceed, in the understanding that a number of documents will be found and shared.

I would like to note that at any time I have been presented with a list of documents to be found within the initial scope before being asked to narrow it down, as is customary.

Yours sincerely,

Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado

Dear EEAS ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS,

I appreciate the FOIA response. However, I would like to express my disappointment. In a previous message, it was noted that there was an "excessive number of relevant documents" that justified a request to narrow down the scope of my search. By contrast, once I did it under your guidance, I was provided with just three documents related to a public event.

This resulted in an unsatisfactory FOIA response that failed to provide the information I was initially seeking after successively reducing the scope of my search. I believe relevant information that met my previous requirements has been omitted from the final scope.

Yours sincerely,

Luis Miguel Hurtado Coronado