The once destroyed community that's now a global energy giant

This year’s US-Israel conflict with Iran has only increased Europe’s reliance on American LNG, as Iran’s efforts to block the Straight of Hormuz has hit LNG exports from another key exporter, Qatar.

The US now supplies about two-thirds of Europe’s gas imports, up from roughly a quarter in 2021, according to energy analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Susan Bourgeois, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development, says that the state’s LNG exports have helped Europe improve its supply security.

“They want reliable relationships for their energy,” says Bourgeois. She points to buyers across Europe signing longer-term contracts since the invasion, not cargo-by-cargo as before. “It’s about dependability and predictability, that’s what matters.”

That dependence has a cost, argues Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, an analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis global think tank. She says that Europe is now reliant on US LNG supplies, and competing with Asia for the same cargoes, which pushes up prices.

She says that the EU is expected to get as much as 80% of its LNG imports from the US by 2030.

Nowhere is that exposure felt more sharply than in Germany, the EU’s biggest manufacturer, producing more than a quarter of the block’s industrial output.