Europe Bought One-Third of Its Turnberry Energy Pledge in 2025 — Analysts Say the Gap Cannot Be Closed

The European Union's commitment to purchase $250 billion annually in U.S. energy — the central pillar of the Turnberry agreement signed by U.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at Trump's Turnberry golf resort in Scotland on July 27, 2025 — was already off track before its first full year was complete.

 In 2025, the EU's total purchases of U.S. oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and coal amounted to approximately $73.7 billion, according to Kpler, the energy data and analytics firm. That figure was lower than the $80.5 billion recorded in 2024 — and less than a third of the annual Turnberry target. The number did not grow. It fell.

To reach the commitment, the EU would need to more than triple that volume in twelve months. Researchers at Kpler, Argus, the energy price reporting agency, and Columbia University agree that the target is physically unreachable.

Whether the gap matters, however, depends on what the commitment was designed to do. For Argentina LNG projects attempting to sign their first long-term European offtake contracts in the 2025–2028 window, the question is less whether Turnberry succeeds and more whether European buyers respond to its political signal — because even a declared preference for U.S. supply raises the bar for a South American alternative.

Why the Target Cannot Be Met

U.S. LNG export terminals are operating at full capacity. There is no physical headroom to redirect incremental volumes toward Europe without diverting them from other buyers, primarily in Asia. The new liquefaction projects that would provide additional capacity are not expected to come online before 2027 or 2028. Simultaneously, European refineries are not configured to process the volumes of light U.S. crude that meeting the target would require: the continent's refinery fleet was built for denser crudes.

Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, has described the target as virtually unachievable unless the EU imports exclusively from the U.S. and simultaneously replaces all remaining pipeline gas imports with American supply. Kpler put a number on it: the value of U.S. LNG imports alone would need to multiply by six, holding all other trade flows constant.

 Joseph Majkut, director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told S&P Global Commodity Insights that the Turnberry gap of hundreds of billions of dollars cannot be bridged by LNG exports alone.

What the Number Actually Does

The question is not whether the target will be met. It will not. The question is why it exists. The Trump administration needed a headline on energy dominance; Brussels needed to reduce the 30% tariffs threatening its industrial exports. The $750 billion figure — the three-year total across oil, LNG, LPG, and nuclear technology — is the currency of that exchange, presented in terms that neither party needs to deliver literally.

The agreement imposes no purchase obligations on private companies. European energy buyers — utilities, trading firms, refiners — make decisions based on price, technical compatibility, and existing contracts. The European Commission cannot order them to buy LNG from Louisiana rather than from Qatar or Norway. Von der Leyen acknowledged this implicitly when she told reporters after the signing: "Details have to be sorted out and that will happen over the next weeks."

SEFE Securing Energy for Europe, the German state-owned company built from the assets of Gazprom Germania following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is among the entities responsible for LNG procurement across the bloc. Its contracts, and those of comparable buyers, follow commercial logic — not political declarations.

What the Agreement Does Move

That the target is aspirational does not make the agreement inconsequential. The political pressure generated by Turnberry is orienting European buyers toward U.S. suppliers during the 2025–2028 window — precisely the period in which new producers, including Argentina LNG projects, are attempting to sign their first long-term contracts with European counterparties. A political signal that favors U.S. suppliers makes it harder — though not impossible — for a German or Dutch buyer to justify signing with a South American provider rather than a North American one.

Argentina's LNG development projects carry a structural advantage that becomes commercially material precisely in this environment: cargoes loaded from Río Negro province's Golfo San Matías can reach European terminals via Atlantic trade routes that bypass the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal entirely — two chokepoints whose disruption has driven European buyers to accelerate the diversification of their supply base.

The Title Transfer Facility (TTF), Europe's natural gas benchmark, was trading at approximately €61/MWh at the time this analysis was written, driven by the Strait of Hormuz closure and the attack on Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar's main LNG and petrochemical export hub. 

Rabobank, the Dutch bank and commodity research firm, projects a full-year 2026 average of €50/MWh. In that pricing environment, any producer that locks in contracts now captures margins that will not recur once Vaca Muerta LNG capacity and new U.S. supply come online in 2027–2028.

For Argentina's LNG development pipeline, Turnberry is not a door that closed. It is a window that narrowed.