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Europe has been importing growing volumes of liquefied natural gas from Russia and should consider replacing these with supply from other sources, including Qatar, according to Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“Europe has been importing a lot of Russian LNG to help its economies,” Birol said on Tuesday at the International Energy Week conference in London.
“It may be high time to replace this with LNG from Qatari and other sources from 2027,” the head of the IEA said, as quoted by Reuters.
The EU has significantly boosted imports of Russian LNG in recent months.
Russian LNG accounted for 20% of the EU’s liquefied natural gas imports in the first nine months of 2024, compared to 14% for the same period in 2023, amid markedly lower EU imports of the super-chilled fuel, a report by the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) showed in October.
The rising share of Russia’s LNG in EU supply comes as a concern for several EU member states that have been pushing for ways to curb Europe’s reliance on Russian LNG cargoes.
The European Union will look to import more LNG from the United States and other countries and accelerate the rollout of renewable energy as it seeks to replace the Russian gas supply and cut its gas dependence, European Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen said last week.
“There will still be the need for gas, and there we will have to find other sources than Russia, and that can also mean bigger import from the U.S,” Jørgensen told Reuters last week.
The IEA warned this weekend of a tighter LNG market in 2025 as low EU gas inventory levels at the end of this winter “will require much bigger inflows of gas than in the previous two years, increasing Europe’s call on global LNG markets and tightening market fundamentals.”
