Remarks on the reporting
Latest Update: February 2025
Interesting Facts
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global standard that promotes financial transparency and accountability of government revenues generated by the extractive industry. By implementing the voluntary initiative based on the EITI standard, over 50 countries worldwide are helping to combat corruption and mismanagement and promote good governance in this important economic sector.
National implementation and reporting topics
A Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG) was established at the beginning of 2015 to implement the EITI standard in Germany (D-EITI). The group with representatives from government, companies and civil society is responsible for implementation and regular EITI reporting in accordance with the EITI standard. Since 2023, the mandatory information and data have been published online1 during the reporting year. In addition, there are reports on topics that D-EITI MSG believes are relevant for the extractive sector.
The D-EITI reporting thus offers the public the opportunity to find out about various but intertwined topics of the extractive industry in Germany. These are:
- Which natural resources are extracted in Germany?
- Natural resource production in Germany
- What are the legal framework conditions?
- What revenues does the state generate from the extraction of natural resources?
- Economic importance
- Sustainability in the extraction of natural resources
- Payment flows of the extractive industry (report by an independent administrator)
Summary
With the 7th D-EITI reporting (reporting year 2022/2023), the D-EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group would like to focus on the following information about the extractive sector and its framework conditions:
The most important revenues from the extraction of natural resources on the state side are the taxes of general company taxation (corporate tax and income tax together with solidarity surcharge and trade tax). In addition, there are natural resource-specific mine site and extraction royalties. Together, these revenues generated by the extractive industry amounted to approximately €814 millions in 2022. This represents 0.04% of total Federal Government revenue. Compared to the previous year (around €487 million), revenues increased by around 67% (cf. revenues generated by the extractive industry)
Disclosure of the payment flows from the extractive industries has shown the following: in 2022, the payments made by the companies participating in the D-EITI process to government agencies for the payment flows corporation tax, trade tax, mine site and extraction royalties as well as lease payments and payments for infrastructure improvement amounted to €803 million. Compared to the previous year (€216 million), revenues increased by 27% (cf. Disclosed payment flows and quality assurance).
In 2022, 69 mining licenses were newly granted nationwide in the sectors considered by D-EITI. On the last key date of 31 December 2022, according to the Federal Office of Statistics approx. 1,340 km², i.e. approx. 0.4% of the area of Germany is used as mining land. Compared to the previous year, the use of land as mining land has thus fallen minimally (cf. Managing human intervention in nature and landscape).
The report provides an overview of the contribution of the domestic extractive sector to the relevant energy sources in Germany. In 2022, the share of primary energy consumption in Germany accounted for by the natural resources included in the D-EITI reporting was around 35% for crude oil, 23.3% for natural gas and around 10% for lignite. Domestic production of crude oil and natural gas covered around 2% and around 5% of consumption in Germany respectively, while lignite production covered around 100%. Consumption of exclusively imported hard coal was higher than in the previous year and accounted for around 9.8% of primary energy consumption (see Effects of the energy transition and the structural change on the extraction of natural resources in Germany).
Part of Germany’s exports come from the domestic extractive sector. In 2022 (2023), Germany exported goods worth a total of around €1.59 trillion (€1.58 trillion). Products of the extractive industries accounted for some €11.4 billion of this amount (€5.2 billion), according to the primary raw materials considered by D-EITI, equivalent to 0.72% (0.33%) of total exports. At around €9.0 billion (€2.9 billion), crude oil and natural gas accounted for the largest share of exports. However, these are predominantly re-exports of natural gas (cf. Economic importance of the extractive industry).
The report also gives an overview of Employment and Social Affairs. At the end of 2022 (2023), around 59,000 people (58,000 people) were employed in the extractive industry. This corresponds to around 0.17% of all employees in Germany subject to social security contributions (the same in 2023). Compared to the reporting period 2016 (1st D-EITI report), the number of employees in the sector fell by around 12,300 in 2022 (approx. 13,300 in 2023), mainly due to the phasing out of hard coal mining by the end of 2018 (cf. Employment and Social Affairs).
In accordance with the current requirements of the EITI Standard 2023, the D-EITI is increasingly reporting on the impact of the energy transition on the extraction of raw materials in Germany. To this end, the information on the “Effects of the energy transition and the structural change on the extraction of natural resources in Germany” has been restructured and the legal framework has been supplemented with the Heat Planning Act and the Geothermal Energy and Heat Pumps Act draft.
Risk-based approach for quality assurance of payment data
At the request of the International EITI Secretariat, the MSG has introduced and further developed a procedure for alternative quality assurance of payment flows in the area of financial transparency, in which the payments made by extractive companies to government agencies are disclosed.. Since the third reporting cycle, the reconciliation of payments made by extractive companies participating in the D-EITI with the revenues of government agencies, known as payment reconciliation, has been replaced by a general and risk-based analysis of government processes. The pilot phase has ended and the developed risk-based approach was included as a standard procedure in the EITI Terms of Reference for implementation in all EITI member countries in October 2024. The D-EITI is thus successfully contributing to the further development of the international EITI standard.
The collection of payments, the quality assurance process and the risk assessments were carried out and supported by an independent administrator appointed by the MSG and in accordance with the EITI Standard. Participation by the reporting companies was on a voluntary basis. As part of the seventh reporting, the independent administrator determined that there is a low risk of irregular payment flows. Therefore, a plausibility check of the payment data is sufficient. The quality of payment data to government agencies is thus ensured.
This seventh D-EITI reporting was prepared by the German MSG in cooperation with the independent administrator Grant Thornton AG, auditing company, Dusseldorf. The reporting on payment flows in the extractive sector contains information for the 2022 reporting year. The remaining chapters contain additional data for 2023, if available.
All information and data listed in this report as well as further visualisations and downloadable data tables in open-data format can also be found online on the D-EITI reporting portal www.rohstofftransparenz.de.
Information on the D-EITI process and the D-EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group can be found at www.d-eiti.de.
MSG objectives for D-EITI
We, the Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG), commit to the principles set forth in the 2023 EITI Standard by setting ourselves the following objectives with respect to EITI implementation in Germany:
- Ensuring timely reporting that is understandable and accessible to the general public, based on a transparent, open and innovative EITI process in Germany;
- Processing contextual information concerning the German extractive sector, with a view to promoting a broad debate on resource policy that includes aspects of (economic, environmental, and social) sustainability;
- Achieving an understandable, commensurate and increasingly comprehensive reporting to the general public in compliance with the EITI Standard and in harmony with the EU Accounting and Transparency Directives. Besides, added value shall be generated;
- Contributing to the further development of the EITI Standard and its implementation and acceptance as a de-facto global standard, to support the global striving for transparency and accountability as well as the fight against corruption in the extractive sector;
- Sharing experiences from the multi-stakeholder process, in particular with respect to participatory democracy, citizen engagement and knowledge transfer, and also with regard to EITI implementation in a state with a federal structure;
- Substantially enhancing Germany’s credibility in providing political and financial support to the EITI;
- Ensuring the ongoing implementation of the D-EITI with the intended multi-stakeholder model while building capacity for broad-scale public debate.