Claim: Since 2022, the EU has increased LNG imports from alternative suppliers including the US — Verdict: TRUE

The claim is that since 2022 the EU has increased imports of liquefied natural gas from alternative suppliers, including the United States. The verdict is true, and it is supported by multiple independent primary and authoritative secondary sources with consistent, specific figures.

The numbers are unambiguous. According to IEA Gas Market Report Q1 2023, total EU LNG imports rose by approximately 60% in 2022 compared to 2021. The United States alone supplied around 22 bcm to Europe in 2022, up from roughly 7 bcm in 2021. Eurostat data confirm the US share of EU LNG imports leapt from about 6% in 2021 to roughly 37% in 2022 — the largest single-country share. Gas Infrastructure Europe's transparency database shows US-origin cargoes held that leading position through 2023, and Bruegel's European Natural Gas Imports dataset records US LNG to the EU roughly tripling between 2021 and 2023.

The policy intent behind these numbers is equally well-documented. In March 2022, the European Commission and the US government issued a joint statement committing the US to endeavour to supply at least 15 bcm of additional LNG to the EU in 2022, rising to 50 bcm annually by 2030. Two months later, the European Commission's REPowerEU Plan formalised the broader diversification strategy, targeting an additional 50 bcm per year of non-Russian LNG from the US, Qatar, Norway, and Algeria. The supply shift was not accidental — it was a deliberate, coordinated policy response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The strongest version of a counterargument would note that LNG from alternative suppliers could not fully replace the volume lost from Russian pipelines. That is genuinely true and worth conceding. According to Bruegel, Russian pipeline gas to the EU fell from roughly 155 bcm in 2021 to about 80 bcm in 2022 and further to around 25 bcm in 2023 — a drop of 130 bcm over two years. US LNG, even tripled, covered only a fraction of that gap. The rest was made up through a combination of demand reduction, renewable energy acceleration, and increased supply from Norway, Qatar, and Algeria. But none of this contradicts the claim, which is specifically about whether EU LNG imports from alternative suppliers increased. They did, substantially and verifiably.

The manipulation risk here runs in both directions. Supporters of EU energy policy sometimes cite these figures without acknowledging the remaining dependence on fossil fuels or the scale of the gap that LNG could not fill. Critics of the energy transition sometimes use the same figures to argue the EU is simply swapping one fossil-fuel dependency for another. Both framings are selective. The factual core — that EU LNG imports from the US and other non-Russian suppliers rose sharply from 2022 onward — is not in dispute by any of the cited sources.

When you encounter this claim in the wild, the key question to ask is what it is being used to prove. The increase in US LNG imports is real, but it neither vindicates nor condemns EU energy policy on its own. Watch for arguments that treat one accurate data point as a complete picture of a complex, multi-year energy transition.