US authorities will stop gas supplies to the EU if its authorities do not weaken regulations on methane emissions

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has warned the European Union that US gas supplies will go to other markets if the bloc does not ease regulations on emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. He stated this in an interview with Bloomberg on the sidelines of a conference in New York. Wright said:

“Without meaningful reform of this rule, Europe will face serious pain, which is unnecessary. It’s not a matter of escalation - our energy will go to the market in any case, it will just flow in a different direction.”

The announcement comes as European Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen vowed to resist pressure from the United States and other LNG exporters to revise methane emissions rules. Washington previously warned Brussels that the complexity of this regulation and the threat of fines would jeopardize the parties' trade relations. EU energy ministers are due to discuss the regulation at a meeting in Luxembourg on Friday.

The European Union's dependence on American gas has grown since the bloc began moving away from Russian energy amid Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was previously reported that by 2028, the share of US LNG in European gas imports could reach 80%, and experts warned of the risk of a new energy dependence forming in Europe - this time from a single supplier. At the same time, the fight against methane emissions remains one of the key elements of the EU climate policy, since this gas has a higher potential to influence global warming than carbon dioxide.

Wright's approach is at odds with the Biden administration's climate policy, which with the EU launched the Global Methane Commitment in 2021, an initiative to cut emissions by at least 30% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels. Proponents of Washington's current approach point to the difficulty of tracking methane leaks across America's extensive system of production basins, while LNG exporters complain that the threat of fines for non-compliance with European regulations is holding back new contracts.