EU ponders pivot from U.S. LNG dependence

European policymakers are beginning to wake up to the reality that dependence on U.S. LNG brings with it significant geopolitical risks.

In late January, the European Union’s commissioner for energy and housing Dan Jørgensen said that Europe needs to diversify away from its U.S. LNG dependence, calling the threats to Greenland a “clear wake-up call.”

“These are very turbulent times,” Jørgensen told reporters in Brussels. “What has made the situation more serious and complex is the strained relationship to the U.S. and the fact that we have an American president that does not exclude using force against Greenland,” he said.

The EU is now looking for alternative LNG suppliers. “Canada for sure, Qatar, North African countries,” he said.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and a delegation of German industry executives travelled to Riyadh on Wednesday in an effort to diversify energy supplies. A day later, they visited Qatar and the UAE.

The efforts, while still modest and somewhat preliminary, are a sign that top European officials recognise that the EU’s relationship with the U.S. has fundamentally changed.

Leaving aside Norway, which is not an EU member but whose energy sector is “structurally embedded in the European gas system,” Europe sources over 59 percent of its LNG imports from the United States, according to a recent report from a trio of European think tanks —Ecologic, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and Clingendael.

Successful efforts to shrink dependence on Russian gas have resulted in a corresponding increase in dependence on U.S. LNG. Between 2019 and 2025, European imports from Russia dropped sharply from 203 billion cubic metres (bcm) to 38 bcm. But LNG imports from the U.S. shot up from 14 billion cubic metres (bcm) to 83 bcm.

As the Ecologic report notes, the EU has defined energy “diversification” simply as gas not sourced from Russia. “Under this logic, a Member State, or even the Union as a whole, would be considered fully ‘diversified’ once imports from Russia are reduced to zero, even if – hypothetically speaking – 100 per cent of its remaining imports originate from a single alternative supplier.”

“The EU’s growing reliance on the US as its main LNG supplier bears the risk of energy being ‘weaponised’ once again to exert pressure, locking Europe into costly new dependencies,” the authors wrote. Citing Venezuela and Greenland, they said: “[T]he EU’s dependence on US LNG could in the future be leveraged as part of coercive efforts to influence EU policies across multiple domains.”

Both the gas industry and the U.S. government have heavily lobbied to gut the EU’s Methane Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), two high-profile European policies aimed at imposing accountability on polluters. American officials had explicitly linked demands for deregulation with the threat of tariffs.

“I think, or I hope, that all Europeans can see now that it was a huge mistake to be dependent on Russian fossil fuels. We should never have done that. And now we have to make sure that we will have no dependencies on other countries outside Europe, not only in energy, on everything,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in late January.

Even as the EU succeeds in finding alternative gas suppliers, Europe would remain hooked on the LNG market, which is volatile and susceptible to geopolitical crises. Underscoring that liability, EU gas prices spiked in late January as a result of a U.S. winter storm that temporarily disrupted LNG flows, a reminder that supply outages can come in many forms.

Cutting down on fossil fuel imports would help insulate the EU from such vulnerabilities.

A more “resilient” strategy for EU energy security “would be one primarily based on rapid renewables deployment, electrification, energy efficiency, improved power-system resilience and the targeted use of renewables-based fuels and feedstocks,” the Ecologic report argued.

Europe is taking some tentative steps in that direction. In late January, the governments of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom committed to building 100 GW of offshore wind in the North Sea. The agreement came just a few days after Trump had ratcheted up tension over Greenland.

“We are standing up for our national interest by driving for clean energy, which can get the UK off the fossil fuel rollercoaster and give us energy sovereignty and abundance,” British energy minister Ed Miliband said in a statement.

EU’s tepid response

In the short run, Europe is set to buy more LNG as gas storage levels have dropped to just 43 percent full, sharply lower than at this point a year ago, and at their lowest levels since 2022. European imports of LNG are expected to rise to 185 bcm in 2026, which would be a record high, according to the International Energy Agency.

Experts warn that the EU is still not doing enough to wean itself off gas in the medium-term. The EU pledged to buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy products over a three-year period as part of the July 2025 U.S.-EU trade agreement. Those figures are unrealistic, but if somehow realized, it would mean that by 2030, the EU would depend on the U.S. for 80 percent of its LNG import needs, according to IEEFA.

Deepening the LNG trade with the U.S. could undermine the energy transition and create new vulnerabilities to European sovereignty.

“[B]y locking in long-term gas contracts, the EU risks undermining its Green Deal and energy autonomy,” IEEFA’s Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz wrote.

125 environmental and civil society organisations signed a joint letter in late January, urged the leaders of the European Union to stand up to Washington.

“One partner’s dominance is, logically, another’s subservience. In his quest for US ‘energy dominance,’ Trump pressures the EU to dilute its own climate commitments and commit to trade deals that enrich US fossil fuel companies and entrench his own power at the EU’s own expense,” the letter stated.

They called for the cancellation of negotiations over the U.S.-EU trade deal, the prevention of new long-term LNG deals, a defence of the Methane Regulation, and a roadmap for a fossil fuel phaseout.

By mid-February, the European Parliament agreed to move the trade deal forward, but they inserted a clause that allows for its suspension in the event that Trump resumes threats to European territory.

It isn’t clear that the strong-arm tactics from Washington will entirely succeed. A January 26 auction in Greece for pipeline capacity to import LNG was a total flop, which analysts saw as a sign that either there was very little commercial interest in LNG imports in southeast Europe, or that buyers were skittish about American LNG following the Trump administration’s seizure of Venezuela and threats to Greenland. The auction resulted in less than 0.1 percent of the capacity on offer actually getting booked.

That result was all the more striking given the high priority that the Trump administration has placed on Greece as a gas and LNG “hub” for southeast and eastern Europe. A splashy gas conference in Athens last November, with a heavy presence from the U.S. government, was intended to position Greece as a U.S. LNG import hub.

“The auctions did not go well at all, and this was a result of the conflict that existed and still exists [between the EU and the U.S.],” said Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou.

(Writing by Nick Cunningham; editing by Sophie Davies)