Hydrocarbons are traditional subjects to European Union (EU) law (“acquis communitaire”). A short historical review reveals that quasi all aspects of upstream and downstream segments are covered by the legislation. The results of applied information extraction and elaborated quantitative analysis indicate that the intensity of legislation making correlates with global drivers such as oil price booms, and technology developments such as extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons by hydraulic fracturing. A quarter of a century after the Hydrocarbons Directive was published and transposed by Member States (MS), data allow us to make a semi-quantitative assessment on the implementation, the major drivers of governments’ publication activity, and the impact on the oil and gas production. Another specific relevance of this study is on non-energy minerals management of the EU, whether the introduction of similar competitive bidding rules would induce a greater interest of investors, and the enhanced competition could bring more benefits to the states by the rejuvenation of the critical minerals extractive sector. The preliminary findings show that in some MS there is a positive correlation between the concession call publication activity and hydrocarbons production. To confirm these conclusions the analysis of an extended dataset including exploration data, investments, and social impacts is needed in order to screen the effect of global market trends, the exhaustion of domestic geological reserves, and the different policy environments.

Geological aspects and the related duties of geologists are embedded into numerous sector-specific legislation of the European Union and its legal predecessors. In a broad sense, geology-related topics make up about 10-15% of EU legal documents. The founding treaties of the Euro-pean Coal and Steel Community and Euratom provide rules related mainly to the fossil fuels extractive industry. In the last decade of the twentieth century, environment, water and waste management regulatory fields entered the Community domain, along with geological issues. Energy policy, de-carbonization, raw materials policy and the cir-cular-economy concept generated numerous new tasks for geoscientists over the last twenty years. The Professional Qualifications Directive acknowledges geology as a reg-ulated profession, it facilitates the mobility of geologists across Member States, and, together with the codification of geoscientists' work, drives geoscience professionalism in Europe.