The announcement by EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that the EU would phase out Russian natural gas imports by 2027 is expected to lead to dramatic reorientation of the continent's energy import landscape.The European Commission is expected to present a proposal by May 2022, which will provide further details about how the bloc plans to achieve reductions of Russian natural gas imports of around 66% by the end of 2022.The EU is expected to respond to the need to rapidly increase natural gas imports by expanding FSRU capacity over the near term, while accelerating the construction of larger capacity LNG import terminals.However, the sheer scale of Russia's exports to the European customers suggests that expanding European natural gas import capacity to offset the reduction in Russian gas imports will be hard to achieve within the next year or two.
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