The European Union is considering offering a specific deal to the United States to buy American LNG to address President Trump’s grievances against the U.S. trade deficit with Europe, POLITICO reported on Monday, quoting anonymous European officials familiar with internal EU discussions.
The EU is weighing aggregating LNG demand across its members to place a large bulk-buy offer. Still, the EU would be ideally looking to buy the American LNG at competitive prices, according to POLITICO’s sources.
Last week, Lithuania’s Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas told Reuters that the bloc could consider aggregating the countries’ LNG demand to buy LNG from the United States.
“I think that would be one of the potential future talks, about the demand and the potential managing of the demand in the regions, or in the entire EU,” Vaiciunas told Reuters, commenting on how the EU could approach the talks with the U.S. while the tariffs are frozen, for now.
Last week, President Trump aired the idea that the European Union should pledge to buy $350 billion worth of energy from the United States if it wants tariff relief.
“One of the ways that that can disappear easily and quickly is they’re going to have to buy our energy from us … they can buy it, we can knock off $350 billion in one week. They have to buy and commit to buy a like amount of energy,” President Trump said.
The European Union is ready to commit to buying more liquefied natural gas from the United States if that would appease President Trump and make him reconsider tariffs, the EU’s energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen said later in the week.
However, $350 billion worth of LNG is roughly equal to some 40 million tons of the super-chilled fuel. That’s more than half of the EU’s total LNG imports last year of some 75 million tons, much of which came from America anyway, per the bloc’s statistics agency, Eurostat.
