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Despite Donald Trump pledging to buy $750 billion of US energy over the next three years, the EU has spent 7 percent less on oil and gas than the US in the past four months.
While the bloc bought greater amounts of US liquefied natural gas since its trade deal with Washington in August, oil and gas prices have fallen, leaving the overall value lower than the same period last year.
Imports of liquefied natural gas and oil into the EU totaled $29.6 billion from September to December, according to an estimate by energy consultancy Kpler.
Gillian Bokara, senior director at Kepler, said the non-binding trade agreement has done little to spur additional purchases of US goods.
Commodity purchases were negotiated bilaterally and driven by economics, including freight costs and margins, rather than political pledges, he said, adding that purchase commitments were “unrealistic”.
Annual imports into the EU were $73.7 billion, less than a third of the value needed to meet the $750 billion energy purchase commitment for 2026 to 2028. Nuclear energy products such as uranium, which are part of the trade deal, account for less than 1 percent of the EU’s energy trade with the US.
Argus Media, a price reporting agency, said that if the EU replaced all Russian gas with American LNG, it would likely import about $29 billion a year over the next three years, or just 23 percent of the value required under the deal.
As a result, gas prices would have to quadruple to $37.3 per million British thermal units by 2028 to meet the EU’s trade target – a scenario that runs contrary to market expectations. According to Argus, the 2028 futures are trading at around $8.2 per MMBtu, compared to around $10 per MMBtu currently.
Prices last reached $37.3 per mmBtu in December 2022, a year when LNG prices and EU purchases soared during the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Kpler’s Bokara said that even if the EU replaced all Russian gas with US supplies, it still would not be enough to triple the import price. “We can’t trust the obvious logic other than that (the trade agreement) is a way to reduce (US) tariffs,” he said. “We can’t see the math working.”
Markets are expecting oversupply and low gas prices in the coming years, as countries including the US, Qatar and Canada plan to increase production. The possibility of a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire has also cooled market sentiment.
Argus’s Martin Senior said both the EU and the US lack sufficient import and export infrastructure, such as storage tanks and regasification systems, to significantly expand their energy trade.
To commit to a trade deal, the EU would need to increase import capacity by more than 50 percent, while the US would need to more than double its export capacity, he said.
A former member of the European Parliament with long experience in energy policy said the lack of economic logic made the agreement a way for the European bloc to buy time and postpone a direct confrontation with the US president – whose term ends in January 2029 – while defenses against Russia are being prepared.
“The time of reckoning should be postponed. And when the time of reckoning comes, perhaps the war will be over,” the former MEP said.
The European Commission has said it has bought about €200bn ($236bn) of US energy products in the first 11 months of 2025. It has increased imports of oil and gas, particularly US LNG, and said it expects to buy a total of 70 billion cubic meters of US LNG in 2025, up from 45bcm a year earlier.
“This trend will continue into the future, with at least nine new long-term contracts for US LNG signed by EU buyers this year,” a spokesperson said.
It was not clear how much of these future purchases were included in the commission’s total figure. This also included a Polish deal to buy three nuclear reactors from Westinghouse in a €42bn power station project.
Additional reporting by Andrew Bounds in Brussels
