Europe escaped Russian gas only to concentrate its winter supply on a single transatlantic partner. The Hormuz crisis shows why that should worry Brussels.
When the European Union set out to end its reliance on Russian gas after 2022, the goal was never simply to change suppliers. It was to make Europe’s energy system harder to coerce. Four years on, as the continent enters winter with depleted storage and gas prices at levels unseen since the height of the last crisis, that goal looks only half achieved. Europe has escaped one dependence and drifted into another. The Hormuz crisis has not created this vulnerability, but it has exposed it with unusual clarity.
A winter without a cushion
The numbers are stark. On 1 November, when European storage normally begins to draw down, EU facilities stood at 74.56 per cent full, roughly eight points below the same date last year. Germany, which holds about a fifth of the bloc’s capacity, entered the heating season only 61 per cent full. The International Energy Agency has warned that Europe is going into winter with its lowest storage in more than a decade, leaving a thinner buffer against shocks and a greater reliance on global LNG. On 28 October, the Dutch TTF benchmark crossed €100 per megawatt-hour intraday, a threshold the month-ahead price had not been assessed above since December 2022. According to EU energy regulator ACER, the crisis has already added an estimated €18–33 billion to the bloc’s gas import bill this year.
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The immediate cause is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the US-Israeli war on Iran began in February, which has largely cut off around a fifth of global LNG supply. Qatar’s share of EU imports was modest, but the loss of its cargoes has tightened the entire market and set Europe against Asian buyers for every flexible shipment. A quirk of market structure made matters worse: through the summer, near-term gas traded above winter contracts, so injecting gas into storage lost money. Brussels responded by loosening its own storage targets rather than forcing the issue.
From diversification to concentration
The structural problem lies beneath the cyclical one. With Russian supply being legislated out and Qatari volumes trapped behind Hormuz, Europe’s gas security now rests on two main pillars: Norwegian pipeline gas and American LNG. The United States accounted for 62 per cent of combined EU and UK LNG imports between January and August this year. In 2025 the EU was already taking more than half of all US LNG exports. Analysts at the Ecologic Institute have argued bluntly that this is the opposite of diversification.
The phase-out of Russian gas will deepen this concentration. Short-term Russian LNG contracts have already ended, and the ban on long-term contracts takes effect on 1 January 2027. Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen has been firm that “that ban stands”, even as prices rise. That is the right decision for Europe’s security vis-à-vis Moscow. But the voices calling for delay are worth listening to for what they reveal: a senior executive at Spain’s Port of Bilbao has warned that replacing Russian volumes too quickly would leave Europe increasingly dependent on US LNG and reduce supply diversity. The argument for delay is weak; the diagnosis behind it is not.
Is an ally’s leverage still leverage?
The obvious objection is that dependence on the United States is categorically different from dependence on Russia. It is a fair point and should be taken seriously. US LNG is sold by many private companies in a liberalised market, not by a state monopoly answering to the Kremlin. Poland’s Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) argues that the risk of Washington weaponising energy supplies is limited by these structural differences. American exporters also need European buyers, especially while the trade war with China persists.
Yet leverage does not require a pipeline valve. It can be exercised through linkage. The 2025 transatlantic trade deal already tied tariff relief to a pledge that the EU would buy $750 billion of US energy by 2028, a target most analysts regard as unrealistic. That turns energy purchasing into a standing item of trade diplomacy, where any shortfall can be framed as a broken promise. Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly treats energy dominance as a foreign-policy tool, and the US government retains legal authority, through export controls or emergency powers, to halt or reduce sales if it chooses. Earlier this year, the Greenland dispute and accompanying tariff threats prompted Brussels to start exploring alternatives to US LNG. That reaction is telling: European officials already understand that an ally’s goodwill is a variable, not a constant.
There is also a domestic American constraint that receives too little attention in Europe. US consumer groups and federal analysts have linked record LNG exports to rising domestic gas and electricity prices. A future administration facing a cold American winter and angry voters could face pressure to prioritise the home market. Europe’s supply security would then depend on a political debate in which it has no vote.
The problem of stacked dependencies
The deeper strategic issue is not energy in isolation. It is that Europe’s dependencies on the United States are now stacked. The continent relies on Washington for nuclear deterrence, for much of its high-end military capability, for intelligence and increasingly for the gas that heats its homes and powers its industry. Each dependency on its own may be manageable. Together they hand a single partner multiple, mutually reinforcing points of pressure at a moment when that partner’s priorities are openly transactional. The Russian experience taught Europe that energy dependence is a security question. The lesson now is that concentration matters even when the supplier is friendly.
None of this argues for slowing the Russian phase-out or for treating the United States as an adversary. It argues for taking the “diversification” in REPowerEU literally rather than rhetorically.
What a sturdier strategy would require
First, demand reduction must return to the centre of policy. Chatham House has argued that even a reopening of Hormuz will not resolve Europe’s core vulnerability, which is over-reliance on expensive, insecure gas; Wood Mackenzie has likewise described demand reduction as the biggest lever within Europe’s control. Every bcm not consumed is a bcm no one can use as leverage.
Second, storage policy needs repair. A system that leaves tanks half empty whenever summer prices exceed winter prices is a security flaw. Treating a portion of storage as a strategic reserve, filled regardless of market spreads, would cost money but buy resilience, much as strategic oil stocks do.
Third, Europe should use its weight as a buyer to spread long-term contracts deliberately across suppliers, including Qatar once Hormuz reopens, North and West African producers and the eastern Mediterranean. Joint purchasing can strengthen Europe’s hand in these negotiations rather than leaving member states to compete with one another.
Finally, the energy transition should be understood as security policy rather than climate policy alone. Renewables, grids, interconnectors and storage cannot be embargoed, tariffed or diverted to a higher bidder in Asia. Since 2022, Europe’s investment in renewables has already softened the impact of gas shocks on power markets. The task now is to build on that.
Conclusion
This winter’s outcome will depend largely on the weather. A mild season may let Europe muddle through, as it did in 2022. But luck is not a strategy. The Hormuz closure has shown how quickly a distant war can empty Europe’s buffers, and the scramble for cargoes has shown how heavily the continent now leans on a single transatlantic supplier. Europe broke its dependence on Moscow because it understood that energy could be used as a weapon. It should not wait for a quarrel with Washington to learn that the same logic applies to friends. Strategic autonomy means more than buying from a friendlier seller. It means needing any one seller less.
