U.S. seeks to expand LNG exports to Southeastern Europe
At a conference put on by the U.S. Department of Energy in Athens, a high-level American delegation pressed European governments to expand gas import infrastructure and buy more U.S. LNG.
U.S. officials travelled to an energy conference in Athens on November 6th to promote American gas exports for Southeastern Europe. The unusually large and high-level U.S. delegation highlights the lengths to which Washington is prepared to go to lock Europe into buying more of its LNG.
Under the banner of the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC), an initiative spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. sought to convene about two dozen countries in central and eastern Europe, to explore energy infrastructure development. The event in Athens, the sixth P-TEC meeting, took place on November 6th and 7th.
The speakers positioned U.S. LNG as a key pillar in Europe’s effort to break its dependence on Russian gas.
“We have a tremendous opportunity to displace all of the Russian gas —all of it, every last molecule —out of western Europe,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said at the conference. “The United States has the gas. We would love nothing more than to cooperate to build this infrastructure.”
The central vision of the P-TEC conference was to build out the “Vertical Gas Corridor,” a plan originally proposed nearly a decade ago, but one that only received renewed momentum after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It has been taken up even more aggressively by the Trump administration and has support in many Southeastern and Eastern European capitals.
The logic is to use the existing gas network to import LNG in Greece and move the gas from Southeastern Europe to countries further north, through Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, and to Ukraine. Unlike other countries, Ukraine has vast gas storage infrastructure, so imported gas could be stored there or moved further into eastern and central Europe.
The Vertical Corridor would complement the existing flows of LNG imports from the Baltic Sea, where U.S. LNG arrives at import terminals in Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. The U.S. is seeking to expand the volumes of this trade — the Polish government is in talks with the U.S. on LNG deals that could see gas routed to Ukraine and Slovakia, according to Reuters.
Convening the conference in Athens underscored the key role that Greece figures into U.S. plans to bring American gas into Europe. Secretary Wright called Greece the “perfect entry point” for U.S. LNG, a framing echoed by the Greek hosts.
“The prospects for future collaboration are enormous,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ahead of the main conference. “Greece’s unique geographic position makes it the natural gateway for U.S. LNG into Europe.”
Greece brought a floating LNG import terminal at Alexandroupolis online in 2024. It was offline for much of this year because of technical problems, but resumed operations in August. It features as one of the pivotal terminals for ramping up gas imports into Southeastern Europe.
Expanding the Vertical Corridor also includes increasing the capacity of existing gas infrastructure. Greece is close to completing the expansion of gas export capacity to its neighbours from 2 billion cubic metres (bcm) to 8.5 bcm, said Maria Rita Galli, CEO of the Hellenic Gas Transmission System Operator (DEFSA). That combined with the Alexandroupolis floating terminal would mean that “in a few years we have completely changed the shape of the Greek infrastructure system.”
“The Vertical Gas Corridor is a highway, maybe the one and only highway from south to north that could bring US LNG to households and business consumers” in Eastern Europe, said Vladimir Malinov, executive director of Bulgartransgaz, which is also an investor in Alexandroupolis FSRU.
By “2026, the infrastructure will be in place. The increased capacity will be in place,” he said.
While the LNG trade flows have been relatively low to date, the American gas industry sees a lot of potential buyers in Eastern Europe.
“Currently 127 contracts have been signed with U.S. projects with 67 counter-parties from around the world, 25 different countries,” said Fred Hutchison, head of LNG Allies, a Washington-based lobbying firm. “Unfortunately, only one country in Eastern Europe has to date signed up for long-term contracts, and that’s Poland. Our objective is to expand that.”
LNG Allies has worked with European industry groups to weaken EU rules on methane, which would facilitate more deal-making for U.S. gas.
Ahead of the P-TEC conference, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with the U.S. delegation to explore energy deals.
On Friday, Venture Global announced a deal with a newly-formed joint venture consisting of Greek gas companies AKTOR and DEPA. The 20-year deal would see 0.5 million tonnes per year of LNG flowing to Greece beginning in 2030. Venture Global had previously secured import capacity at the Alexandroupolis LNG import terminal.
A day earlier, ExxonMobil announced a deal with Energean and HelleniQ Energy to explore for gas off the coast of Greece, with drilling potentially occurring in 2026 or 2027, the company said. But gas would not flow until the 2030s and that is if everything goes well, Exxon officials told Reuters. The gas would either enter the Greek domestic market or put into the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which runs to Italy.
“America is back and drilling in the Ionian Sea,” the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said at a signing ceremony with representatives from each of the companies.
Europe’s LNG dependence
The U.S. sent more than 80 American officials to P-TEC, an indication of the heavy importance the Trump administration has placed on exporting more LNG to Europe. That included both Secretary Wright and Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum, the two heads of Trump’s “National Energy Dominance Council.”
Officials from the U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Export-Import Bank (EXIM), two entities that issue public financing for infrastructure projects, were also in attendance, an indication that the Trump administration may be considering public financing tools for potential deals.
They were met with a receptive audience in Athens. The governments and companies in Southeastern Europe are keen to import more U.S. LNG.
But there are risks in such a strategy. From Europe’s perspective, severing ties with Russian energy only to switch to U.S. LNG would simply replace one dependency for another, critics say.
“European countries risk over-relying on one supplier if they commit to long-term US LNG contracts,” Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, wrote on LinkedIn. The U.S. supplied 57 percent of Europe’s LNG imports in the first half of 2025. That figure was even higher for specific countries — 94 percent of Germany’s imports came from the U.S., and 84 percent for Greece.
IEEFA estimates that European gas demand is in decline, and could drop by 19 percent between 2025 and 2030. In Southeastern Europe gas consumption could decline by 24 percent through 2050. Building out LNG infrastructure today poses financial risk as those assets could end up being under-utilized as demand wanes.
The political risks of European dependence on the U.S. were also evident in Athens. In July, the Trump administration pressured the EU to agree to a trade deal, which included an EU commitment to buy $750 billion in U.S. energy products.
Even as experts have widely panned that figure as unrealistic, the Trump administration has tried to ensure that Europe buys more gas.
In September, at a gas conference in Hamburg, Germany, a U.S. Department of Energy official, Nathan Reich, addressed representatives of Eastern European countries, pressing them to spell out the specifics of potential contracting terms that would unlock more deals. Reich said he expected the governments to come up with proposals for more U.S. LNG and bring those to Secretary Wright at the Athens P-TEC conference.
At the same time, the U.S. is putting immense pressure on the European Union to weaken some of its policy directives. The two that have raised the most ire from the U.S. energy industry are the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Methane Regulation. The CSDDD would impose obligations on corporations operating in Europe to ensure their supply chains comply with sustainability and human rights standards, and the Methane Regulation would set limits on the methane intensity for imported gas.
“CSDDD in European regulations, it is an absolute existential risk to affordable energy in Europe,” U.S. Energy Secretary Wright said on Thursday at the P-TEC conference.
The U.S. government and the American oil and gas industry have repeatedly targeted the CSDDD. ExxonMobil has publicly called for it to be scrapped. Secretary Wright wrote a joint letter with Qatar to the EU member states, suggesting the directives threatened the flow of LNG to Europe. They called on the EU to weaken the CSDDD.
“If you can’t do business from countries around the world, not just the United States, but all the countries, you make it too risky and too expensive to do business here, that gas will go elsewhere. We don’t want to see that happen,” Wright said in Athens.
U.S. officials and LNG companies called on the P-TEC attendees to put pressure on European officials.
“I will echo Secretary Wright…where you all can help with the EU, and that’s regarding CSDDD,” said Khary Cauthen, vice president of government affairs at Cheniere Energy. “I’d also add in some of the methane regulations that…We are going to sell the molecules. We want to be partners with Europe. We just need your help to help that be the case.”
The U.S. has thus far found a willing partner in Greece. In October, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote a column in the FT that critiqued European regulation and advocated for a slower energy transition.
Greece was also one of the few countries to assist the Trump administration it its effort to spoil the International Maritime Organization’s limit on shipping emissions in October, which would have been one of the few concrete achievements for international climate diplomacy in recent history. News reports indicate the Trump administration bullied representatives of multiple nations into opposing the agreement.
Greece voted to abstain from the levy, breaking with the EU, after voting in favour for the limits earlier this year. In response, a U.S. State Department official commended Greece.
(Writing by Nick Cunningham; editing by Sophie Davies)