Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will lead a delegation to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, seeking to secure supply deals for liquefied natural gas to diversify away from the United States, Bloomberg has reported, adding that Merz will also look for closer cooperation with the Gulf states on defense.
The news follows a statement by EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen, who signaled last month the bloc was growing uneasy about its overwhelming dependence on U.S. liquefied gas that could put it in an unfavourable position geopolitically.
The dependence came to light amid President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland one way or another, prompting European leaders to reconsider their relationship with the United States.
Merz and the delegation will first visit Riyadh, where they will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed, the report said, and then they will travel to Qatar, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of liquefied gas, and the United Arab Emirates.
Germany is the largest energy consumer in the European Union and lost the most in terms of cheap gas supply from Russia after Gazprom reduced flows in the wake of EU sanctions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. Since then, Germany has been importing more LNG, with 94% of that coming from the United States, per Bloomberg.
“The very high dependence on the US is problematic because it creates new geopolitical and price risks,” one senior analyst from the Institute for Economic Research told Bloomberg. “The lesson to be learned from this is that Germany should reduce its overall dependence on fossil fuels and not just switch supplier countries.”
That reduction, however, has proven to be more difficult than many analysts believed, so Germany is, for now, looking for an alternative switch. This is problematic as well, however, because of the country’s emission reduction plans, which envisage a ban on all LNG imports from 2043. Gulf LNG producers tend to be partial to long-term supply deals, and that import deadline would be a sticking point in any negotiations.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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