Outlook for LNG Imports into the EU to 2025
by Luca Franca
This paper is part of the series ‘CIEP Perspectives on EU Gas Market Fundamentals’. This is the result of a comprehensive research project conducted in 2016 with a view to anticipate possible developments in gas supply and demand in the EU in the run-up to 2025 and discuss the sustainability of the EU’s diversification efforts.
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is often quoted as being a plausible alternative to pipeline gas from Russia1 for consumption in the EU, where supply diversification is being sought – especially after EU-Russia relations have soured owing to the political crisis in Ukraine. In this vein, the European Commission (EC) has recently heralded a new ‘LNG Strategy’ which calls for actively engaging with current and prospective LNG suppliers and for completing the internal market to enable gas imported as LNG to flow unhindered within the EU. This adds to other supply diversification prospects for new land-bound supply lines from a number of countries located to the southeast of Europe, as analysed in a dedicated paper.
This paper discusses the extent to which LNG could contribute to supply diversification. This is done by investigating how much additional LNG could reach Europe in the next decade. There is a clear distinction between the period up to 2020 – for which additional volumes can be more easily quantified, given that they will originate from capacity already under construction – and the period between 2020 and 2025 – in which the degree of uncertainty is higher due to the need to consider supplies from projects on which final investment decisions (FIDs) have not yet been taken.