BRUSSELS — The European Union is on track to get nearly half its gas from the United States by the end of the decade, creating a major strategic vulnerability for the bloc as relations with Washington hit an all-time low.
New data shared with POLITICO shows Europe is already importing a quarter of its gas from the U.S., a figure that is set to soar as the bloc’s total ban on Russian gas imports is phased in.
It comes as an increasingly belligerent President Donald Trump flirts with seizing Greenland, a territory of Denmark, in a move that could destroy the NATO alliance and throw transatlantic relations into crisis. Tensions escalated over the weekend when Trump announced he would put new tariffs on European countries including France, Denmark, Germany and the U.K. until a deal to sell Greenland to the U.S. was reached, prompting calls for the EU to retaliate with drastic trade restrictions of its own.
The EU’s growing reliance on imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas “has created a potentially high-risk new geopolitical dependency,” said Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, lead energy analyst at the the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the think tank that produced the research.
