The European Union (EU) will seek to more gas from other countries, including the US, to replace Russian supplies and will expand the use of renewables faster to reduce its overall dependence on gas, said EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen on Friday, the 21st of February, reports Reuters.
The EU has pledged to completely switch away from Russian fossil fuels by 2027 in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While Russian pipeline gas supplies have fallen, the EU increased imports of Russian LNG last year.
“Instead of paying for gas with taxpayers’ money, with citizens’ money, the proceeds of which go into Putin’s war coffers, we need to make sure that we produce our own energy,” EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said in a joint media interview, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Jorgensen said Brussels was preparing changes to permitting rules to speed up renewable energy production. For industries and home heating, where gas cannot be quickly replaced by electricity, he said the EU would step up efforts to find alternative sources of supply.
“And then my job is to make sure that the product is cheap and not Russian,” he said.
“Gas will still be needed and we will have to look for other sources than Russia, and that may also mean more imports from the US.”
European benchmark gas prices rose to a two-year high last week.
Before taking office in January, US President Donald Trump warned that the EU would face trade tariffs if it did not import more oil and gas from the US.
The European Commission does not buy gas directly, but has drawn up plans to work with LNG suppliers and has looked at investing in LNG export infrastructure abroad to try to secure more long-term contracts with stable prices, draft documents show.
In a draft document reported by Reuters this week outlining measures to reduce European energy prices, the European Commission said it would “immediately work with reliable LNG suppliers to identify additional cost-competitive imports from existing and future LNG export projects”, without specifying which countries it wanted to work with.
Under EU law, Europe’s gas contracts must expire by 2049 to meet the bloc’s climate change target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Jorgensen declined to comment on the leaked draft documents, which the Commission will publish next week.
However, he confirmed that the Commission is working on tighter gas market controls to avoid speculative trading leading to price spikes and will next week propose “financial instruments” designed to decouple retail electricity prices from high gas prices.
EU electricity market rules mean that, despite the rapid take-up of renewable energy in Europe, the price of gas still determines the price of electricity for many European consumers.