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No, absolutely! But all those new floating gas terminals are agnostic to who's LNG carrier docks and delivers gas. Any country with gas liquidation tech can now sell to Germany - and that's most of the counties with gas wells.
Specifically, the US doesn't operate a single large LNG carrier. Those are built/owned/flagged/operated by third parties, and they can just pick up gas for Germany from somewhere else.
Gas delivery by LNG carrier is a mature global market. Japan, South Korea and India have historically imported a lot of their energy needs this way. Now the EU does, too.
That makes sense. But I assume either we've cut Germany a sweetheart deal (in which case I imagine that will be revisited soon!) or US LNG is cheaper than LNG from most other countries (otherwise Germany wouldn't buy US LNG). In either case, hiking US LNG prices is Bad For German Industry. I'm not saying you can Stop Eurotank 2.0 with this One Simple Trick necessarily, but it does seem to me that if the US wants to make their arms deals a more attractive option, they have some tools to do it (and indeed from talking to you it sounds like they are leveraging tools I hadn't even considered to do so!) As you say, some of them are very escalatory, and I doubt the US is going to break with Europe simply over arms deals (or a lack thereof). But I could definitely see the US stepping in if European industry is shaky.
In particular, I imagine the French will probably continue to do their own thing. But I would not be surprised if the Americans try to horn in on traditional German territory with arms deals to e.g. Spain, Scandinavia, the Baltics.
Kind of both / neither.
There are two main approaches to buying massive amounts of energy fuel (such as LNG) off the market: you either do spot-market purchases (paying what the market is charging at the moment), or you do fixed-price contracts. Fixed price contracts are often a bit higher than market price forecast at the time of purchase (or else there'd not be reason to sell it), BUT it protects you from price fluctuations if the market suddenly spikes (like if the Russian natural gas suddenly goes off the market and the Europeans with big checks start looking for less available supply).
When the gas crisis hit, Germany's limiting factor wasn't necessarily the gas on the market (though it was bad), but rather import capacity / throughput. This is why floating LNG terminals were brought in- they were faster than land-based- infrastructure.
While these were being arranged, the Europeans went to the American markets. In 2022/2023, the Biden Administration relaxed some regulatory controls to allow LNG exports to the Europeans. However, because the US government doesn't actually control the LNG companies, those were treated ass commercial transactions, and so the Europeans various bought off the spot market or made contract purchases. This was a basis of the later 2022/2023 European media stories / war propaganda narratives about how the US was trying to price-gouge Europe like a bad ally (because it wasn't offering discounts).
In 2024, this reversed for not-at-all electoral politics reasons. In January 2024, the Biden administration announced a pause in LNG exports in order to do an environmental / economic impact study. During this period, that coincidentally prevented more contracts to Europe or Asia, the gas was thus kept in US markets, reducing energy prices. It mysteriously also found that if you sell gas for more at global-market rates, then it raises the gas-energy prices for Americans who have to compete. This was realized in December, which is to after the election.
Which- to return to PB's point- is kind of why the 'US gas as a leverage tool' doesn't quite work like that. The Germans are back on the global market, so you can't exactly 'raise' their prices without either (a) shaping the entire global market, or (b) destroying their important infrastructure. Which- despite some conspiracies- the US hasn't been in the habit of doing. And similarly, the US can't get leverage by giving the gas away for cheap because (a) it isn't the government's gas, and (b) that comes with electoral consequences. Russia never cared, because Russia's been an oligarchy for decades, but it's not the sort of policy to survive a transition to 'drill baby drill.'
Interesting info, thanks.
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