US President Donald Trump meets European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Turnberry, Scotland. The EU pledged to buy billions of dollars’ worth of energy resources from the US. Experts say that’s unrealistic and could hurt Europe’s climate goals. Photo / Tierney L. Cross, the New York Times
Trade negotiations have for years focused on the rules of the road for commerce between nations.
Under United States President Donald Trump, the deal-making has been more direct, especially when it comes to energy.
Countries are now agreeing to purchase American fossil fuels, in specific amounts and often years into the future, whether or not their economies will demand it or whether the US will have the ability to supply it.
That adds a layer of government sway over what are typically open market transactions.
And it’s not clear how — or whether — political leaders will get private companies to go along.
“This is new, and generally that’s because in trade agreements you want things that are clear and enforceable,” said David Goldwyn, a former US diplomat and Energy Department official.
“These energy commitments are neither clear nor necessarily enforceable. They’re more aspirational, political encouragements.”
The European Union, for example, committed to purchase US$750 billion in US energy products — including crude oil, natural gas and other petroleum derivatives — over three years.
On an annual basis, that would amount to more than three times the amount the bloc bought last year from the US.
The EU has been buying more American gas since Russia, previously a big supplier, attacked Ukraine in 2022, and there is appetite to buy more.
But purchasing US$250b a year would require the bloc to use the US as essentially its only supplier.
“They would have to not buy from anybody else, and that would just be an enormous amount of dependency on one country, whether it’s us or anybody else,” said Jason Feer, an analyst at the energy and ship brokerage Poten and Partners.
“And the whole premise of modern energy systems, energy supply, is you always want some diversity.”
Conversely, US$250b is around 80% of the total amount that the US exported to the entire world in 2025, according to a ClearView Energy Partners analysis of federal data.
Plants are coming online that will double the country’s natural gas export capacity by 2030, and stocks in export companies like Cheniere and Venture Global climbed after the deal was announced.
In the near term, sending significantly more to the EU may mean sending less to customers elsewhere in the world.
Even if these quantities made economic sense, the EU cannot compel private companies in its member countries to buy so much.
And the US Government doesn’t have the power to tell its oil and gas companies where to sell.
The challenge of holding a government to a purchase commitment made in a trade deal became apparent in Trump’s first term.
He persuaded China, an economy tightly steered by the Government, to agree to buy certain amounts of energy and agricultural goods. Most of those targets were not met, and there were no consequences.
Typical trade pacts have protocols that allow either side to enforce pledges like commitments to buy energy; they usually even lay out remedies for violations.
None of those exist in Trump’s agreements.
When asked how the US would react if the EU didn’t meet its energy purchase target after three years, a White House official said that the response would be higher tariffs.
It is not yet clear what the trade agreement with the US will mean for the EU’s ability to meet its climate targets.
A 2021 law requires member nations to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030.
In the short term, more gas could help with that by supplanting coal. Purchasing too much gas could end up squeezing out clean power sources such as wind and solar.
Before the trade deal, the continent’s overall gas demand was expected to decline in the coming years.
“It is possible that it would displace some deployment of renewables,” said Joseph Majkut, director of the energy security and climate change programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“But the reality is that the EU has very firm climate commitments enshrined in law.”
The parties could, potentially, hit US$750b with tricky accounting. The EU members could purchase tankers full of oil or gas but not use it all and instead resell it to other buyers around the world.
They could also make long-term purchase commitments that look like very large numbers when they’re announced, but in practice are realised over, say, 20 years.
“To do that involves using something we respectfully call political maths,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners. “Some of the best tools of diplomacy involve ambiguity.”
So far, the EU’s energy purchase commitment is as specific as Trump’s trade deals have got.
The framework for Japan, for example, is much more vague. That leaves even more room for interpretation.
A White House fact sheet on the Japan deal trumpets a “major expansion” of US energy exports, and says the US$550b in US investment that Japan pledged would be partly focused on “energy infrastructure and production”.
That is probably a reference to the proposed US$44b infrastructure project that would bring gas from the North Slope of Alaska to an export terminal. From there, it could be shipped to Asia.
Right now, however, there are cheaper sources available on America’s gulf coast that are connected to gas fields with many years of supply left.
It’s also not clear how much value there is in signing multidecade purchase agreements when Japan has also committed to reducing its consumption of fossil fuels.
The same logic applies for South Korea. It began to buy natural gas from the US in 2017, when the country was trying to phase out nuclear energy.
Signing long-term agreements didn’t work out as well as hoped: An explosion at a gas terminal in Texas in 2022 interrupted supply, leaving less gas available to buy and raising prices sharply.
That’s why Michelle Kim, an energy specialist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, argues that buying gas as needed, rather than committing to a multiyear deal with US exporters, would give South Korea more flexibility as it managed declining demand for gas.
“It’s not a good and wise decision to make another long-term contract,” Kim said.
If the US presses ahead to drastically increase its exports, there could also be ramifications for America’s own energy market. As long as enough infrastructure exists to move it around, fuel generally flows to the highest bidder.
With more gas going overseas and powering data centres for artificial intelligence, domestic prices are likely to rise, said Aneesh Prabhu, a managing director at S&P Global Ratings.
That impact could worsen in the coming years, since Trump and congressional Republicans cut subsidies for wind and solar deployment passed during the Biden Administration.
“Because of the loss of tax credits, or at least a significant erosion of it, you could have a slowdown in renewables, which means there would be more draw on gas,” Prabhu said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lydia DePillis and Rebecca F. Elliott
Photograph by: Tierney L. Cross
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