WARSAW, Poland - Poland's shale gas reserves are far lower than originally forecast, the government said Wednesday, a disappointment for a country that had been hoping to break its dependence on Russian energy imports.
The recoverable reserves are between 346 billion and 768 billion cubic metres, according to the government estimate. That is enough to fully satisfy the country's gas requirements for about seven decades.
But until recently, hopes had been that the reserves would be many times larger. A U.S. estimate last year put them at about 5.3 trillion cubic metres.
Shale gas is located underground across the European continent, from France to Ukraine, but many countries have decided not to attempt to extract it due to environmental concerns. The extraction calls for large quantities of water laced with chemicals and sand to be used to fracture the rock and release the gas.
Environmentalists say hydraulic fracturing can contaminate ground water, pollute the air, and even sometimes cause ground tremors.
Poland has huge stores of coal that generate 93 per cent of the nation's electricity output, but it remains heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas for other energy needs. This dependence is expensive and a source of resentment in this former Soviet satellite state, which rejected Moscow-backed communist rule 23 years ago.
Currently, about 70 per cent of Poland's annual needs of 14.5 billion cubic metres of gas are covered by Russian imports.
Deputy Environment Minister Piotr Wozniak stressed that the new shale gas estimates are preliminary and based on archival data. He said they could be revised upward when findings are published from wells currently being drilled. The report says total recoverable reserves could be as high as 1.9 trillion cubic metres.
"These confirmed reserves of shale gas guarantee Poland's energy security for decades to come," Wozniak said.
Poland's energy mix will also include nuclear and renewable energy, according to a government plan reaching to 2030.
Usually, only 25 per cent of existing shale gas deposits are recoverable by a technology called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, according to Jerzy Nawrocki, the head of the State Geological Institute that compiled the report along with the Ministry of the Environment.
The U.S., which developed the technique of hydraulic fracturing, is the only country so far to engage in widespread exploitation of shale gas, which is trapped thousands of meters (yards) below ground in porous rock.
More than 20 international companies have licenses to drill in northern and western Poland, many among them U.S-based. Some have made test wells, and are still analyzing data from them.
Prepared along with the U.S. Geological Survey, Wednesday's numbers are based on pre-1990 data taken from 39 wells drilled for research and exploration. In making the estimate, an analogy was drawn between the geological situation in Poland and in the areas where gas is being produced in the United States.
