Echoing the Obama administration’s move to temporarily halt deepwater drilling in response to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the European Union’s top energy minister has called for a “de facto” moratorium on extreme deepwater drilling in European waters until more is known about the gulf accident.

“Given the current circumstances, any responsible government would at present practically freeze new permits for drilling with extreme parameters and conditions,” Gunther Oettinger, the European Union’s commissioner for energy, said last week in a speech at the European Parliament. “This can mean de facto a moratorium on new drills until the causes of the accident are known and corrective measures are taken for such frontier operations as the ones carried out by the Deepwater Horizon.”

Mr. Oettinger laid out what he described as “five critical steps” that European regulators need to undertake to ensure that drilling remains safe. These included reinforcing the technological safeguards currently in place to prevent blowouts, reviewing and strengthening emergency plans by well operators and carrying out a “stress test” on existing legislation governing drilling at extreme depths.

The commissioner said that drilling companies should be required to show they have the financial strength necessary to cover the damage resulting from any environmental catastrophe they might cause. “We have to see what best instruments can be used in that regard, whether insurance obligations, a special European fund or some adequately robust solution,” he said.

Norway, a major oil producer with offshore operations in the North Sea, announced its own temporary deepwater drilling ban in June.

However, London-based companies are still angling for offshore drilling licenses for the central North Sea, where fields holding much as 300 million barrels of crude have been identified west of the Shetland Islands.