Donald Trump’s trade wars have placed a renewed focus on Europe’s lack of energy independence, with a reduction in gas imports from Russia being replaced by an increase from the US — a development experts warn the combative US president might use as leverage in tariff negotiations with the EU.
After imposing a sweeping 20% tariff on EU goods at the start of the month — but before pausing that higher rate a week later, leaving in place a 10% “baseline” rate — Trump suggested that the EU should buy $350 billion worth of liquefied natural gas (LNG) each year to narrow its goods trade surplus with the US.
“They're going to have to buy their energy from us, because they need it and they're going to have to buy it from us,” he said on 7 April.
Trump’s demands notwithstanding, the bloc has been increasing imports of American LNG since it began phasing out Russian supplies in 2022. The US was already the EU’s largest supplier of LNG by 2023, according to Eurostat data, an advantage it maintained in 2024, despite a 5.5% year-on-year uptick in Russian imports.
LNG tankers from the US supplied 17% of Europe’s natural gas in 2024, making the US Europe’s third-largest supplier of gas in absolute terms — be it from pipelines or LNG — after Norway and Russia, according to the International Energy Agency. Upon returning to office in January, Trump subsequently lifted former President Joe Biden’s ban on LNG terminal construction to prepare for more exports.
With the US no longer the ally it once was to the EU — Trump’s demand for more gas purchases came with the observation that “the European Union's been very bad to us” — analysts warn that this new dependency is also a vulnerability.
“The US is a wildcard,” Gayle Allard, professor of economics at IE University in Madrid, told The Parliament. “While Trump wants Europe to take more LNG, he’s so volatile that I could imagine Europe being worried about relying on him.”
EU decoupling from Russia
Europe is the largest gas consumer in the world. Until February 2022, Russian gas accounted for about one-third of Europe's demand for natural gas. By late 2022 — in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Moscow was throttling pipeline flows in response to EU measures against its more profitable oil exports. Then, in September that year, an unknown actor sabotaged the Nord Stream undersea pipeline.
The EU looked to Norway for gas, with additional contracts concluded with countries such as Qatar and Algeria.
The bloc began to build large numbers of LNG terminals, seeking to reduce its reliance on pipeline imports from Russia. While the EU still imports a significant amount of LNG from Russia, its total Russian gas imports have fallen to about one-quarter of 2021 levels.
In early May, the European Commission unveiled a long-awaited proposal to phase out all Russian gas imports by the end of 2027, including a ban on new contracts starting this year. The announcement followed the EU executive’s move in late March to impose its first restrictions on Russian LNG transited via European ports to non-EU countries, hindering Russia’s global sales.
American 'freedom gas'
The US has encouraged Europe’s decoupling from Russia and stepped up with supplies of its own. During his first term, Trump imposed sanctions on all parties involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 submarine gas connection between Russia and Germany, prodding Berlin instead to buy “freedom gas” from the US.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed opening negotiations to increase imports of American LNG. And at a meeting of EU ministers on 7 April, the bloc's commissioner for trade, Maroš Šefčovič, confirmed LNG is on the table in potential negotiations over tariffs. The EU is now weighing options to pool demand for American LNG through its joint purchasing platform.
The EU’s executive body does not act as a direct purchaser of gas, but it has coordinated joint purchases since 2023 to boost the bargaining power of member states.
Some in the EU see this increased trade as a net positive. Roberts Zile, a member of the European Parliament from the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR), has written in these pages that there are both political and economic advantages to deepening the EU’s energy partnership with the US, particularly when the bloc is still not free of its Russia dependency.
“Energy security is part of the larger general security issue,” Zile told The Parliament. “Russia is waging war in Ukraine. Therefore, it’s just unacceptable to buy LNG from Russia.”
Meanwhile, Szymon Kardas, a senior policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, argued the US was a safer partner than Russia for structural as well as political reasons. European companies deal directly with private American firms, not a state-run behemoth like Russia's Gazprom.
“Trump is unpredictable in many ways, but he doesn’t run the energy sector in a way the Kremlin does in Russia,” he told The Parliament. “There’s always the risk of tariffs, but it’s incomparable with the risks we had vis-à-vis Russia.”
Others see the US as an unreliable partner, at least for as long as Trump is in the White House.
“We can’t make the mistake of becoming dependent on a single [gas] supplier again,” Kai Tegethoff, an MEP from the Greens/EFA group, told The Parliament. “And we certainly can’t let ourselves be bullied into buying energy we don’t need simply to reduce a trade surplus.”
Transition to renewable energy
Despite plans to increase capacity by 70% by 2028, the future of the American LNG industry remains uncertain. One significant challenge is the high cost of building new LNG facilities, which require profitability over decades to justify the investment. Economic uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs could chill investment.
Another concern for the industry is the unpredictable demand for gas in Europe. As the EU accelerates its transition to renewable energy, the pace of that shift will directly influence European gas consumption.
“There is potential for us to buy more LNG from the US, but it must align with our green transition goals,” the EU’s commissioner for energy, Dan Jørgensen, said last week. The Commission projects a record increase in renewable energy capacity this year.
Richard Folland, head of policy and government affairs at Carbon Tracker, a London-based think tank, said it would be a mistake to rely too heavily on American gas. "It doesn't make sense to be too dependent on any fossil fuel supplier, whether it's Russia or the US.”
As the Commission aims to sever gas ties with Russia by 2027, “Europe should be thinking about standing on its own two feet,” he added.
“The answer both for energy security and economics is more renewables.”
This article has been updated to make clearer the timeline of EU reliance on US LNG imports.
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