One of the first actions of the new Trump administration was ending a year-long moratorium on permitting new export terminals for U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG). The so-called “pause” on LNG approvals, imposed in the final year of the Biden administration, was hailed by anti-fossil fuel groups and condemned by U.S. energy producers.
Before the pause, the United States had risen to become the world’s largest LNG exporter at an astonishing pace. The first LNG shipments started in 2016, and within eight years, the United States had eclipsed all of its competitors in the global market.
To be clear, the pause did not apply to existing LNG terminals or those already under construction. Nor did it cost the United States its status as the world’s top LNG exporter. But it did cast doubts over the continued expansion of U.S. LNG export capacity, worrying trading partners and allies. Energy is not just a matter of global trade. It is also a matter of global security – and where that energy is produced carries major geopolitical consequences.
In Europe, for example, the expansion of U.S. LNG has played a central role in the continent’s shift away from Russian natural gas since the 2022 full–scale invasion of Ukraine. Before the invasion, Europe imported more than 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Now, that share has fallen to 15 percent, and the European Union (EU) is within sight of a 2027 goal to replace all Russian gas with other sources. This would not have been possible without a surge of imported gas from the United States and Norway – two founding members of NATO, created in 1949 to counter the expansion of Soviet Russia and preserve democracy in Western Europe.
Gas flows from the United States and Norway, combined with EU conservation measures – including voluntary reductions in household energy use, limits on heating and cooling in public buildings, and shifting some electricity generation from gas-fired power plants to other sources, including renewables – helped meet Europe’s energy needs. This thwarted Russian efforts to blackmail NATO into abandoning Ukraine.
It was not easy and certainly not cheap, as European gas prices surged to five times their pre-war levels in the first few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But within a year, as gas shipments from the United States and Norway stabilized supply and EU conservation measures limited demand, prices had returned to pre-invasion levels.
This turned the tables on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was trying to use Russia’s energy exports to Europe as leverage to block the flow of financial and military aid from NATO member States to Ukraine.
Leaders in the EU are now eager to lock in these new energy trade flows. For example, days after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for continued expansion of U.S. LNG shipments to Europe because it is “cheaper” than other sources of natural gas and “brings down our energy prices.”
The Trump administration’s lifting of the LNG permitting pause sends a clear signal to the EU that U.S. gas will be available for as long as it is needed, promoting both geopolitical and economic stability.
But Europe’s shift away from Russian gas is delivering environmental benefits, too.
Natural gas is the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel, emitting half the carbon dioxide of coal when it is burned in a power plant to generate electricity. But this climate benefit can be eroded by fugitive emissions of methane during production, processing, and transportation of natural gas.
U.S. natural gas is produced under strong environmental regulations and efficient production practices that aim to address these concerns. Not only that, the United States leads the world in the development and deployment of technologies to detect, quantify and reduce fugitive methane emissions, including ground-level monitors, drone surveys, aircraft sensors, satellites, and autonomous real-time operational controls for production sites.
Russia’s oil and natural gas infrastructure, on the other hand, is much more methane intensive. On average, each unit of Russian gas emits around 50 percent more fugitive methane than gas produced in the United States. Data from the International Energy Agency shows that Norwegian gas is even cleaner, with a methane intensity of close to zero. These figures most likely underestimate just how leaky Russia’s gas infrastructure really is.
In the wake of its pivot away from Russian natural gas towards cleaner exporters like the United States and Norway, the EU is moving ahead with a new methane-intensity standard for gas that is either domestically produced or imported from other countries.
Countries in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia, are following suit with their own initiatives to reduce the methane intensity of imported natural gas. The combined result is that major gas buyers in Europe and Asia are using their leverage to incentivize fugitive methane reductions across global energy supply chains.
If the LNG permitting pause had remained in place, the United States could have been struck on the sidelines, despite its clear leadership position in producing and exporting natural gas with low methane intensities. But now, the United States can continue to meet the growing global demand for cleaner natural gas and export its technology and know-how for reducing fugitive methane emissions around the world.
This is more than just a win for U.S. energy producers and technology providers — it also has the potential to deliver major progress on climate change.
Pound-for-pound, methane traps around 80 times more heat over the short-term than carbon dioxide, the better-known greenhouse gas. Eliminating fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas supply chains would have the same climate impact as reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from every car and truck in the world to zero, and at a fraction of the cost.
To be sure, the long-term climate benefits of displacing gas from Russia and other high-polluting sources will depend on the effectiveness of fugitive methane detection, quantification and reduction strategies in the United States and elsewhere. For its part, the Trump administration is pursuing policy reforms to further increase U.S. energy production, and those reforms could change the way methane is regulated at the federal level. However, there is significant support within the U.S. oil and gas industry for keeping federal methane regulations mostly intact, state-level regulations will continue, and international buyers of U.S. LNG are still demanding natural gas produced with low methane intensities.
The trends of the past three years in Europe and the United States hold tremendous promise in terms of geopolitics, energy security, and environmental progress. With the end of the LNG permitting pause, natural gas producers, consumers, regulators and other stakeholders will have the opportunity to accelerate those trends if they choose to seize it.