“Energy Dominance” is the obnoxious authoritarian language that the administration has adopted for how the US will conduct business.
The recent threats and blustering in regard to Greenland have done more than compromise NATO – they have forced Europeans, who have been moving away from reliance on an unreliable Moscow for energy, to begin looking at the US in the same light.
Since 2022 and the Ukraine invasion, Europe has redoubled its transition to non-fossil energy, while, on a parallel track, substituting US LNG for Russia’s pipeline gas. Current Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, a fracking mogul, bought his cabinet seat with massive campaign donations precisely in order to massively expand exports from newly built terminals on the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, the very markets Wright and his Cronies had hoped to exploit are waking up to the reality that under Trump, the US is just another global bully, allied with Russia, that they cannot rely on for critical resources.
Look for Europe to pull back from commitments to US LNG, and accelerate the energy transition – as the DeutscheWelle report notes above, starting with bigger commitments to offshore wind, a direct and very efficient competitor to gas. Although the report notes primarily the concerns about Russia, it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.
In addition, the Trump administration’s ideological denial of the irresistible force of the energy transition has allowed them to believe that the very fastest growing energy markets, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, will somehow sit still and be pliable, dependent, supplicants to US gas supplies. That view is not aging well.
An added kicker is that Trump continues to bully and insult our formerly closest and most trusted ally, Canada – which has it’s own vast gas reserves, and now a fierce new motivation to push back on Trumpian treachery with expanded exports of its own.
The European Union’s energy chief said the bloc is growing increasingly concerned about its dependence on US liquefied natural gas, particularly in the wake of President Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland.
Recent events have been a “wake-up call” for the region, which now relies on the US for more than half its LNG supply, Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said Wednesday. The bloc is actively looking at taking more from Canada, Qatar and North African countries, he said.Trump’s promise to “own” Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, and his threats to countries that try to impede his efforts have forced Europe to reassess its ties to the US across a range of sectors, including defense and energy. A trade deal last year included a commitment for the EU to buy $750 billion of American energy as the bloc diversified away from Russia.
“We are speaking to countries around the world that are able to deliver LNG to us,” Jorgensen told reporters in Brussels. “I definitely hear this when speaking to energy ministers and heads of state from all over Europe that there is a growing concern.”
Jorgensen said that in the coming weeks he would be meeting with possible LNG suppliers. Canada’s energy minister, Tim Hodgson, said in recent days that the country was looking to diversify its gas sales away from the US by boosting LNG exports elsewhere.
“We will never use our energy for coercion,” Hodgson said at a conference in India. “Canada used to provide 98% of its energy exports to a single country. We are committed to diversifying.”
The U.S. already supplies more than a quarter of the EU’s gas, up from just 5 percent five years ago, with dependence set to rise further as a total ban on Russian gas takes effect.
But Jørgensen said the Commission is now actively seeking alternative suppliers to the U.S. and plans to deepen energy ties with a range of countries in the coming months, including Canada, Qatar and Algeria.
“Canada for sure, Qatar, North African countries,” he said, adding that Brussels is also working to secure non-Russian sources of nuclear fuel for member countries that still rely on Moscow.
While stressing that Brussels does not want a trade war with Washington, Jørgensen acknowledged mounting concern inside the EU that it risks “replacing one dependency with another” after rapidly pivoting from Russian gas to U.S. LNG following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It has never been our policy to start trading less with the U.S., and we don’t want trade conflicts,” he said. “But it is also clear that geopolitical turmoil … has been a wake-up call. We have to be able to take care of ourselves.”
The European Union’s competition chief has warned against relying “too much” on US liquefied natural gas imports as the bloc looks to diversify its energy basket.
“We know that we cannot rely on Russian gas, and that we should pay attention not to rely too much on American gas,” Teresa Riberatold RTE Radio in an interview on Tuesday.
If Europe fulfills all its supply deals for US LNG and its gas demand reduction efforts falter, as much as 80% of its imports could come from the US in 2030, up from 57% in 2025, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said in a report earlier this month.
The EU still receives about 15% of its LNG supplies from Moscow, making Russia the second-largest provider of the fuel to Europe after the US.
As more US LNG facilities come online, “the reality is that a lot of gas will be coming onto the market from the US over the next three years,” Michael Lewis, CEO of German utility Uniper SE said at conference in Berlin. “We will never repeat the mistakes of the past in Germany. We will never be as dependent on the USA as we were on Russia in the past.”
Despite the current tensions, some experts see little risk of the US curbing gas exports to Europe, given that it doesn’t export LNG to China and has few other major buyers globally.
“The idea that the US could stop exporting to Europe seems quite dangerous,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, said in a LinkedIn post. “US LNG dearly needs Europe in the current geopolitical environment.”
Wind and solar power produced more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time last year, data published on Thursday showed, indicating the bloc’s continued shift towards low-carbon energy despite resistance from some governments.
Wind and solar generated 30% of the European Union’s electricity in 2025, just above the 29% supplied by fossil fuel power plants running on coal, gas and occasionally oil, according to data from energy think-tank Ember.
Europe’s electricity mix is now mostly low-carbon, with renewables and nuclear power together supplying 71% of EU electricity last year, the data showed.
Why would any country rely on another country for its energy supply when that country’s goal is energy dominance???? Countries around the world are finally waking up to this fact and building out domestic energy infrastructure.
One thing I don’t understand is the reliance on private corporations to build out energy infrastructure. I live in British Columbia, Canada where our electricity is provided by the crown corporation, BC Hydro. We have some of the cheapest, greenest and most reliable electricity in North America. BC Hydro is a very large crown corporation and has the weight to borrow money at favourable rates to build energy infrastructure. My point is, don’t hand this vital service over to private enterprise. You are just trading one extortionist for another.
Why do they hand these VITAL services to private enterprises?
Give you one guess.
This is not being simply cynical.