EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen met US Energy Secretary Chris Wright in Brussels on 11 September.
Following her State of the European Union address to the European Parliament last week, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen got an earful from MEPs angry about her “surrender deal” with Donald Trump. Iratxe Garcia Perez, leader of the centre-left S&D group, blasted von der Leyen’s hypocrisy in calling for Europe to have courage and fight when she herself showed no courage with Trump. "You went to Scotland to bury Europe's strategic autonomy under a golf course,” she told her.
Green group leader Bas Eickhout questioned how she could say in her speech she still cares deeply about climate change, even as she and her EPP group have spent the first ten months of her second term dismantling some of the climate legislation she passed in her first term. “You said we need to be energy independent, but at the same time you sign a Trump deal that promises a $750 billion investment in American [LNG] energy that is dirtier than what we had before. That to replace the Russian LNG gas that is only $10 billion per year for now. These numbers don’t add up…We should invest this money in European renewables and European industry, because renewables are the worst enemy of fossil autocrats.”
The Commission has defended President von der Leyen’s promise to invest $250 billion per year in US liquified natural gas (LNG) for the remainder of Trump’s term (something analysts say isn’t possible to fully deliver) by saying it is just a temporary measure until this can be replaced by renewables in the next decade. But energy analysts have pointed out that building the infrastructure needed to receive the American LNG will lock Europe into long-term dependence. Last week, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in an interview with Euractiv that this is exactly the point.
Contradicting the Commission’s claims that this use of US LNG will be a “short-term measure,” Wright told Euractiv that it is in fact a “long-term change.” “When you buy energy, particularly liquefied natural gas, there’s a huge amount of infrastructure that’s built,” he said. “This isn’t going to be three and a half years and it’ll all be over.”
It’s an important distinction because it will only be possible for the EU to meet its target of reducing emissions by 55% by 2030 and to net zero by 2050 if the use of US LNG is short term. But Wright is right, it doesn’t make sense that Europe would build all of the expensive infrastructure necessary to receive US LNG at its ports and then just stop using it a few years later.
Wright, who was on a visit to Brussels to plan the fossil-fuel-dumping bonanza with EU lawmakers, also dismissed analysts’ claims that the US will not be able to deliver this amount of LNG over the next three years. “During the Trump administration the capacity for the United States to export LNG will double, not increase by 10 or 20 percent,” Wright told Euractiv.
At the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the EU urgently switched from importing Russian pipeline gas to importing liquified gas from the US and other suppliers, most US export terminals and EU import terminals were operating at maximum capacity, and those that are not were not didn’t have the pipeline infrastructure to get the gas to where it needs to go. New port terminals and pipelines have been rapidly built after President von der Leyen agreed with President Biden in 2022 to immediately redirect 15 billion cubic metres (bcm) of US LNG to the EU to help replace the 100bcm of Russian gas the EU stopped importing. That was successfully done. But the plan also called for scaling this up to 50bcm of US LNG per year starting in 2023. That hasn’t happened, for two reasons: the needed export and import infrastructure takes time to build, and market interest has been limited because EU gas demand has actually fallen recently.
To receive more US LNG the US needs to build liquefication export terminals, and the EU needs to build gasification import terminals and pipelines at either end to get the gas to and from where it needs to go. So the problem is that by their very nature, a surge of LNG imports cannot be temporary. Receiving them will require a huge amount of expensive port and pipeline infrastructure to be built, and once it’s built it needs to continue to be used for decades in order to justify the investment. In other words, US LNG can’t be short term, it can’t only be long term.
“A big LNG import terminal takes around five years to build and come online,” Simon Dekeyrel, a climate and energy analyst at the European Policy Centre, told me in 2022. The pipelines connecting that terminal also take several years to build – well beyond the short-term urgency of replacing Russian gas imports. “What we’re seeing right now is a flurry of new announced projects across EU member states. Germany has announced two LNG import terminals. Italy is also considering a new terminal. It’s a huge rush…which might really lead to unnecessary investments in fossil fuel infrastructure which would be much better spent elsewhere.”
The deal’s defenders have insisted that this is an empty promise that can’t actually be delivered so it’s harmless. But the US government has made it clear they don’t see this as a mere symbolic tribute that doesn’t require delivery. They have said that if the EU doesn’t start coughing up the big bucks right away, then the deal limiting tariffs to 15% is off. Europe has to at least start building the infrastructure necessary to receive the US gas, or risk Trump’s wrath.
The argument by the deal’s defenders that this investment is necessary to ween Europe off of Russian energy also doesn’t carry water because Europe has already done so (there is only a little importing still going on, which must be phased out by 2027). A report by the Brussels think tank Bruegel has found that Europe doesn’t need the US gas it has committed to buying.
The EU’s faster-than-expected switch to renewables has meant that gas need is going down. In 2024, overall LNG imports to the EU (of which the US makes up 50%) declined compared to the previous year, which left some of the European gasification terminals that have been quickly built in Germany since 2022 underutilised for the first time. Warmer winters due to climate change and the surge in new renewables meant the LNG wasn’t needed.
Europeans can see how the US government is weaponising Europe’s dependencies at the moment. Von der Leyen even obliquely referenced it in her State of the Union speech. Why then would Europeans be so quick to increase their dependence on the US when it comes to energy? Were no lessons learned about the over-reliance on Russian energy over the past two decades? In five years, after spending billions on port terminals and pipelines to receive US gas and dropping investment in renewables, the EU could find itself far more dependent on American energy than it ever was on Russian energy.