Total U.K. to Use Facebook, Twitter for EU Energy Market Disclosure Rule

Total SA, France’s biggest oil company, will use social media websites Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to comply with European Union energy market disclosure rules at its U.K. exploration and production unit.

“Facebook and Twitter will now be TOTAL E&P U.K.’s principal means of communicating information about unplanned production outages (24/7) under the new REMIT regulations,” the oil and natural gas producer based in Paris said in an e-mail. Total began using that method for communications as of Jan. 30 and hasn’t had an outage since then, Brian O’Neill, an Aberdeen, Scotland-based company spokesman, said today by phone.

European Union Regulation on Energy Market Integrity and Transparency, known as REMIT, established stricter monitoring of natural gas and electricity markets. The rules, which entered into force on Dec. 28, may increase transparency enough to prompt small companies as well as banks and funds to participate more in energy markets. REMIT will be fully implemented by the middle of 2013, according to the EU.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mathew Carr in London at m.carr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net