The US and the EU have announced a major deal on liquified natural gas, in an attempt to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy.
The United States will work to supply the European Union with 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) this year, to help it wean off Russian energy supplies, the transatlantic partners said on Friday, according to Reuters.
This should effectively cut the EU’s dependency on Russian gas by two-thirds this year and end all Russian fossil fuel imports by 2027 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia supplies around 40 percent of Europe’s gas needs. Under the deal, the supply from the US and international partners will rise to 50 billion cubic meters in the following years.
The BBC is reporting that the deal was announced on Friday during a three-day visit by U.S. President Joe Biden to Brussels. Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and offered fresh support to Kyiv.
“Putin is using Russia’s energy resources to coerce and manipulate its neighbors,” Mr. Biden told reporters in Brussels. “He’s used the profits to drive his war machine.”
Biden added some reassurance, saying that the long-term benefits would outweigh the short-term pain that reducing Russian gas supplies would cause.
“I know that eliminating Russian gas will have costs for Europe, but it’s not only the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, it’s going to put us on a much stronger strategic footing.”
President von der Leyen said: “We want, as Europeans, to diversify away from Russia towards suppliers that we trust from our friends and that are reliable. We aim to reduce this dependence on Russian fossil fuels and get rid of it.”
Payment in Roubles only
Russia warned the West on Friday that billing in roubles for billions of dollars of natural gas exports to Europe could be just days away and ordered Gazprom to work out how the payments can be made within four days, reports Reuters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that with the West declaring an economic war on Russia, there was no reason for receiving dollars or euros for Russian exports anymore.
“There is an instruction to Gazprom from the president of the Russian Federation to accept payments in roubles,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “This information will be brought to the purchasers of Gazprom products.”
“Rouble payments are somewhere between very difficult and not possible for the majority of European buyers to organise, and certainly not at short notice,” Jonathan Stern, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, told Reuters.
