| Report | 14 June 2011 |
Shale gas doesn't make Poland the new Norway yet
Ekke Overbeek
Poland is being hailed as Europe's new Qatar. Located deep beneath its rolling landscape are 5300 billion cubic metres (bcm) of recoverable shale gas, more than enough to meet the country’s needs (currently 14 billion bcm per year) for centuries to come. This has captured the imagination of a country that sees its dependency on Russian gas as a threat to national sovereignty. But Poland already seems to have sold its resources to American oil companies – and they might find it more lucrative to sell into the Russian-controlled pipeline network. As one analyst puts it, ‘Poland is not on course to become a second Norway, more a second kind of Turkmenistan.’ Ekke Overbeek reports from Warsaw.
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