U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today announced plans for the United States and Poland to cooperate on exploiting shale gas. Poland recently announced it has a huge deposits of shale gas.
Wood Mackenzie, the oil and gas research group, estimates that there could be as much as 48 trillion cubic feet (1,36 trillion cubic metres) of unconventional gas stretching across northern and central Poland. The gas, which does not lie in conventional reservoirs but inside tight rock formations, has become accessible only recently through the use of new hydraulic fracturing technology developed in the United States.
If confirmed, Wood Mackenzie’s estimate would boost the European Union’s proven reserves of natural gas, which stand at 101 trillion cubic feet, by 47 per cent and be enough to make Poland, which imports 72 per cent of its gas, self-sufficient for the foreseeable future.
Two Houston-based companies, ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil, are betting that Poland, which gets half of its natural gas from Russia, can yield a development boom in shale formations like those that drove a jump in U.S. output of the heating fuel.
The U.S. oil companies obtained exploration licenses this year covering hundreds of thousands of acres in Poland. The country, which imports 72 percent of its gas, could become an exporter of the fuel, said Maciej Wozniak, chief adviser on energy security to Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
“Everything leads to a conclusion that in four or five years, and this is how much time we have to prepare for this, Poland will become a place with quite a lot of gas,” Wozniak said.
