HOUSTON: Energy industry leaders said the burgeoning energy crisis is perhaps more dire in natural gas markets than in crude oil, due to Europe’s dependency on Russia and as prices have been sky-high for months.

Panelists at this year’s CERAWeek conference in Houston have stressed a greater need for secure energy supply. While world crude markets have been roiled by the US decision to stop importing Russian oil, Asian and European gas markets have been in turmoil since last year as Russia slowed pipeline flows. “Clearly what is happening in Europe is the problem of scarcity of gas. It’s not oil,” Gabriel Obiang Lima, Equatorial Guinea’s minister of hydrocarbons said at the conference.

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, shipping out roughly 23 billion cubic feet of gas every day, of which about 90 percent goes to Europe or Eurasia, with about half of that going to Germany, Italy, France and Belarus. The US led an effort early in the year to secure more supply via liquefied natural gas cargoes for Europe earlier, US State Department Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein told the audience in Houston on Tuesday. He said that energy “is the card (Russian President Vladimir) Putin thinks he has to intimidate his neighbors.” The US is the world’s top gas producer, however, currently exports just about all it can in LNG — about 12.6 bcfd, which it sends to destinations across Europe and Asia.

“There’s just no additional LNG that’s coming online to bridge the gap for the gas that’s going to be needed by Europe next year — and it was cold in Asia, and Asia has no other alternative,” said Michael Smith, founder and chief executive of Freeport LNG.

A source familiar with the White House’s thinking said the Biden administration is mulling how much to cooperate with the US natural gas industry, wary that any outreach would be seen by environmentalists as a capitulation on efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

While the EU has not elected to stop buying Russian gas — Russia is still sending gas to Europe via the original Nord Stream 1 pipeline — Britain on Tuesday said it will phase out purchases of Russian oil and gas by the end of the year.