The Yamal contract under which blue fuel from Russia’s Gazprom flows to Poland is coming to an end. But thanks to PGNiG’s investments in gas extraction on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, Poland will finally become independent from supplies from the East.
Natural gas is a desirable fuel not only for households but also for industry. It is used by the power industry, but it is also an indispensable raw material, for example for the plants of the Azoty Group, the largest producer of artificial fertilizers in Central and Eastern Europe. Currently, Poland consumes annually about 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas, of which almost half is imported from Russia.
When the long-term gas contract with Gazprom, called Yamal, was signed in 1996, our country had no alternative to supplies from the East. There was a lack of infrastructure to bring in fuel from another direction. This made Poland vulnerable to price and political pressure from Russia, which could cut fuel shipments at any time.
The first sign of change was the decision to build an LNG terminal in Świnoujście in 2006. The gas port made it possible to import liquefied natural gas from liquefying terminals. The port of Świnoujście has been visited by tankers with LNG coming from Qatar, the USA, Norway, and Nigeria as well as Trinidad and Tobago.
However, to provide a real alternative to the gas from the East, Poland needed gas pipelines enabling the import of fuel from other directions, for example, Norway, which is the second supplier of gas to Europe after Russia.
Thanks to the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline, natural gas will flow to Poland from Norway through Denmark to replace the volumes supplied today by Gazprom under the Yamal contract. Commissioning of a gas pipeline with a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters is scheduled for October next year. In the opinion of people from the gas industry, it will not only be a commissioning of an important investment, but also a breakthrough moment for the energy security of the country.
“This will be the culmination of a long process of diversification of gas supply sources and directions,” notes Paweł Majewski, President of the Management Board of Polskie Górnictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo (PGNiG).
“Poland has new possibilities of acquiring the raw material, however only the launch of Baltic Pipe will mean the end of dependence on the Russian supplier. A relationship whose scope went beyond the purely business dimension,” he adds.
PGNiG has been preparing for the launch of the Baltic Pipe for several years, intensively developing its exploration and production operations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.