The securities provided include securities and guarantees provided to our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders (or those of our non-consolidated associates or joint ventures). The parent company guarantees provided mainly concern the guarantees for the charter of two FSRUs for use by our joint venture EemsEnergyTerminal. The other guarantees concern almost exclusively guarantees to certain credit providers of loans taken out by our non-consolidated participating interest Gate terminal. The guarantees are not freely assignable. The term of the securities provided generally varies between one and ten years; a limited number of securities do not have an agreed end date.

By year-end 2025, we had received € 141.3 million (year-end 2024: € 176.2 million) in counter-guarantees from our co-shareholder in EemsEnergyTerminal (Vopak). Given that the legal conditions for netting have not been met, we have not deducted the counter-guarantees from the guarantees we have provided.

The long-term commitments mainly related to the procurement of nitrogen production capacity, reserved transport capacity using pipelines not fully owned by us and the associated management services, IT and other services.

The long-term commitments do not include any possible obligations relating to the future supply of energy under forward delivery contracts. For further details of these contracts, see the ‘Price risk’ section of note ‎27 ‘Financial risk management’.

Conditional obligations

In Germany, the hydrogen network is financed through intertemporal cost allocation using an amortisation fund. This fund ensures that the initial costs of rolling out the network are spread more evenly between the initial and future users of the German hydrogen network. Annual differences between the permitted revenues and regulated costs are recorded and pre-financed from the amortisation fund. If the amortisation fund is not balanced by 2055 at the latest, Gasunie will have to pay the German state a percentage of the outstanding debt. Our current estimate is that the German hydrogen network will be operated successfully and that the amortisation fund will be balanced by the end of the period, meaning that no repayment will be required.

For a significant portion of our assets, the decommissioning obligation is only a conditional obligation. We have not included a provision in the balance sheet for the assets for which we are not obliged to remove the assets and remediate the site under laws and regulations or under rights or permits, conditional to certain future events not arising. Examples of such future events are situations where our assets result in environmental contamination after decommissioning, or when a rights holder or a permit issuer, invoking a relevant contractual arrangement or authority under public law, requires us to remove our decommissioned assets.

We currently expect our decommissioning obligations to materialise only in a limited number of cases, as we expect the transport of natural gas to remain important in the coming years, after which we expect us to keep a significant part of our assets in operation in the service of the energy transition, for the transport of hydrogen or CO₂ for example. Developments in the energy transition may cause us to revise this assumption in the future.

In addition, we expect us to ultimately not be required to remove decommissioned assets in many cases because the social cost will not outweigh the costs of removal, as a result of which the parties involved will not require us to actually remove these decommissioned assets. Rights holders or permit issuers may also waive their right to have decommissioned assets removed for other practical reasons. This assumption may change if our policy and/or that of the third parties involved changes in the future and/or because of advancements in technical removal options.

In addition, we have claims against Gazprom Export LLC regarding their failure to comply with contractual obligations towards us. On 31 December 2024, the Tribunal rendered its award, ordering PJSC Gazprom to pay the amount covered by the guarantees it issued (Parent Company Guarantees), as well as interest and the arbitration costs we incurred. In the meantime, extensive investigations have been conducted into means of recourse, multiple third-party attachment orders have been imposed, and the third parties subject to those attachments have been summoned. We have also received a counterclaim from Gazprom Export LLC, for which we believe there is no legal basis. We have not recognised a receivable or liability in the balance sheet for the outcome of these claims and/or third-party attachment orders.