BRUSSELS — The European Union expects to hold talks with United States officials as it assesses Donald Trump’s demands for the bloc to buy more U.S. fuel, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
“The priority is to have a conversation, to engage early, discuss common interests and then be ready to negotiate,” said Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, the European Commission’s spokesperson for energy, responding to a question from POLITICO.
The remarks come hours after Trump was sworn in for a second term as U.S. president. The freshly inaugurated president quickly put the EU in his crosshairs, telling reporters, “The one thing they can do quickly is buy our oil and gas,” when asked how the EU could avoid heavy tariffs.
The pressure is part of Trump’s broader goal to ramp up fossil fuel production and exports. Within hours of returning to office, the president moved to scrap a Biden administration-era freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas drilling projects
Itkonen cautioned that while the EU executive itself “is not buying or selling LNG or any other fuels ourselves,” its staffers would talk with Trump officials.
“We need to establish contact with them and see how to move forward,” she said. “But concretely, we are not starting from scratch — this has been something that at the highest level both the EU and the U.S. have had discussions about LNG. What we’ve done over the years from the EU side is to make sure the LNG infrastructure is existing so that companies can buy this LNG.”
The U.S. is already the EU’s second-largest gas supplier and largest source of LNG — a result of Russia’s decision to cut supplies following its invasion of Ukraine. Thus far in 2025, EU countries have imported over half of their LNG from America.
However, Europe’s imports of the supercooled fuel from Russia have also surged in recent weeks, hitting record highs for the first half of the month, amid a cold snap across the continent.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has previously backed the idea of buying more U.S. fuel to eradicate its Russian alternative.
“Why not replace it by American LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?” she said in November. “It’s something where we can get into a discussion, also [where] our trade deficit is concerned.”
However, speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Germany’s Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said that it was unlikely his country could buy much more LNG given around 90 percent of its imports already come from U.S. sources.
“There is not much more we can do,” he said, adding that theoretically, Germany could consider “buying less pipeline gas from Norway.”
But that would make “everything more expensive,” he said.
According to Habeck, forcefully mandating that firms buy LNG from the U.S., rather than wherever it is cheapest, is “the opposite of a market economy.”
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