U.S. aims to weaken EU policy and sell more LNG to SE Europe

The U.S. government recently secured several gas deals at a conference in Croatia, as the Trump administration seeks to expand the LNG trade in Central and Eastern Europe. Some European leaders welcomed the agreements as a way of weaning off of Russian gas. But the burgeoning commercial trade could lock in gas infrastructure, expand it where it doesn’t currently exist, and deepen European dependence on American gas.

U.S. Secretary of Energy delivered an address to the Three Seas Initiative, a forum that promotes closer business ties between Central and Eastern Europe countries. The latest summit, held in Dubrovnik, Croatia on April 28^th-29^th, had a particular focus on how U.S. LNG could expand in the region.

“President Trump is opening a new era of cooperation ​with Southern, Central and Eastern Europe,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told ​reporters in Dubrovnik.

At the conference, Venture Global announced a $6 billion deal with Aktor LNG USA to export LNG to Albania. Aktor, a Greek company, would deliver gas to Albania, using U.S. LNG imported at a Greek terminal. The 20-year agreement is set to begin in 2030.

The U.S. Department of Energy launched the “Trump Peace Pipelines Framework,” a memorandum of understanding to promote gas pipelines across Central and Eastern Europe, which would expand “the region’s capacity to import U.S. LNG.”

The Trump administration also secured a joint statement of intent, signed by the leaders of Croatia and Bosnia, to support the Southern Interconnection Pipeline. The pipeline would link Bosnia to Croatia, where U.S. LNG can be imported on the Croatian island of Krk.

The U.S. government has put a lot of diplomatic capital into trying to push the Southern Interconnection gas pipeline forward. The company awarded a contract to build the project, after months of pressure from the U.S. government, does not have a track record of building pipelines, but is instead backed by Trump’s former personal lawyer, according to The Guardian.

In Dubrovnik, Wright sought to clarify that President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda “does not mean subservient.” But he drew a stark dividing line between Central and Eastern Europe, which he described as dynamic and primed for growth, and Western Europe, which, in his mind, was going backwards as it turned away from fossil fuels. He described Europe’s embrace of “net-zero” emissions by 2050 as a “colossally bad idea.” In his address, he downplayed the severity of climate change.

The Three Seas Initiative, or 3SI, builds on the administration’s ongoing campaign to sell as much LNG in southeastern Europe as possible. Wright attended the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC) in Athens late last year, a U.S.-backed forum with similar energy objectives as 3SI.

The U.S. has gone to great lengths to promote the “Vertical Corridor,” a constellation of pipeline connections that involve U.S. LNG imported into Greece, and from there, the gas would be piped north through Eastern Europe. A second route for increasing volumes of U.S. LNG imports, under this vision, would see LNG arrive at multiple Baltic Sea terminals in Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. Between these entry points sits Ukraine, which has vast gas storage capacity, allowing gas to be rerouted across Eastern Europe.

Civil society groups in the Western Balkans criticized the vision, warning that it would expand the use of LNG in a region that does not need it. They called on Balkan governments and the European Commission to move towards a faster energy transition.

“[T]he EU has rightly identified that the solution to the crisis is to wean itself off of fossil fuels, and to push forward with electrification and renewables. But the United States has liquified gas (LNG) to sell and influence to buy,” a coalition of civil society groups wrote in a joint statement.

The groups noted that permitting and construction of new pipelines and LNG terminals could take upwards of a decade and cost billions of dollars, and the infrastructure would be at risk of going underutilized as Europe transitions away from gas. Long-term gas demand in Europe is expected to continue to decline.

U.S. influence

In February 2026, twelve Central and Eastern European countries signed a joint statement with the U.S. government at a summit in Washington. The text of the statement was not released by any of the governments, but a version appeared in a few Balkan press outlets.

The statement included a commitment to expand the gas trade, and “mitigate, or where possible eliminate, regulations that will hinder gas imports, the construction of new gas infrastructure, and the long-term stability of natural gas trade.”

That passage seems to suggest that 12 European countries have agreed to work with the U.S. government to weaken European regulations that may inhibit LNG imports. The language is sweeping, and would seemingly cover a vast array of European policy, including the EU Methane Regulation and other top sustainability directives. But taken to its logical conclusion, it could also cover nearly any renewable energy and energy efficiency policy because they could be viewed as impacting LNG imports, said Raffaele Piria, senior fellow at the Berlin-based Ecologic Institute.

The statement also made no mention of climate change or affordability, which is very unusual in an official communication focusing on energy, Piria said.

“From a European perspective, what’s the point of U.S. energy abundance, if this energy is expensive and subject to coercive conditions?” Piria told Gas Outlook.

Deepening European dependence on U.S. LNG risks not enhancing European energy security, but resulting in European “subordination,” Piria and other researchers wrote in a paper, published by the Ecologic Institute.

“Subordination comes at a price,” the paper said. European dependence on U.S. LNG exposes the EU to meddling from Washington on a variety of issues. The U.S. “can — and already does — leverage its energy-dominant position to pressure Europe into accepting other US political or economic goals. This could undermine Europe’s core security interests and sovereignty, for example on Ukraine and Greenland, but also on digital and technology regulation,” Ecologic said.

The U.S. campaign to gut European climate policy has not been subtle. Indeed, it has unfolded out in the open. The Trump administration has called for a “full repeal” of the EU Methane Regulation. American oil majors, have also staged a public campaign to fight climate regulation. Top lobbying outfits in both Europe and the U.S. have done the same. Trump has positioned LNG purchases by Europe as a key demand in tariff negotiations.

More recently, five European member states called for a two-year delay of the Methane Regulation, a very similar request from that both the U.S. and European oil and gas industries have made.

The U.S. ambassador to the European Union penned an op-ed in the FT, calling for a complete overhaul of the EU Methane Regulation to ease the way for more U.S. LNG. He warned that the EU faced an “energy crisis” and that it “could be a long, cold and costly winter” in Europe. 

Europe finds itself in an energy crisis sparked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But the EU is now desperately turning to the U.S. for LNG to plug a gaping hole in energy supplies — seeking help from the very supplier that precipitated the crisis in the first place.

That makes the February agreement between the U.S. and a dozen Central and Eastern European countries all the more galling, according to Piria. An agreement emphasizing energy security for Europe was signed just a few days before the U.S. launched a war, which immediately led to a global energy crisis.

At that February meeting were U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and the head of Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council Doug Burgum.

“I mean, if they are signing with 12 other countries, just days before their government is going to make the biggest damage to European and global energy security ever, they either didn’t know, which would suggest they have little say in what actually happens, or they were aware, and then they have been deliberately misleading their European counterparts,” Piria said.

He said it makes little sense for Europe to double down on LNG at a time when gas markets are facing historic upheaval.

“What is the future LNG price? Nobody knows,” he said. “It goes up and down and there is incredible volatility, influenced by political decisions, not least by the Trump administration.”

(Writing by Nick Cunningham; editing by Sophie Davies)