ExxonMobil has initiated a confidential legal challenge to European Union carbon-storage requirements, according to Financial Times reporting relayed by Reuters. The cleanup assignment has reached the stage where the company sends a lawyer to discuss the homework.

The disputed rules require major oil and gas companies to help develop carbon dioxide storage capacity by 2030. Exxon says the market for capture and transportation isn't viable, the deadlines are unrealistic and Europeans will face higher energy costs.

Those are arguments about whether the infrastructure can work on the required timetable. They deserve examination. A deadline does not magically produce a pipeline, however confidently you bold it in a regulation.

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But what a familiar corporate performance: the rule arrives, and suddenly the company is deeply concerned that the economy has not yet arranged a comfortable place for the obligation to sit.

The atmosphere has a lousy procurement department. It keeps accepting deliveries without first ensuring the sender has found an attractive storage business model.

The reported challenge is arbitration, not a legal victory. The Commission did not immediately answer Reuters's request for comment. We don't yet have the outcome.

We do have a useful preview of the meeting: the EU has set a date, Exxon disputes the practicalities, and the carbon will be waiting outside until someone gives it a commercially viable chair.