Caspian Report - Issue: 07 - Spring 2014

With Russia’s
President Vladimir
Putin watching,
Rosneft CEO
Igor Sechin
and President
of ExxonMobil
Stephen Greenlee
signing documents
on February 13,
2013.
Frank Umbach
72
ExxonMobil’s withdrawal from
shale gas exploration in Poland last
June can be seen as a warning signal
against the unrealistic hopes that
Poland will become the “sheikh of
Europe”. But the withdrawal - less
than three months after the Polish
government reduced its estimates of
shale gas reserves - is not necessarily
a confirmation of those more limited
estimates. In fact, it came only few
days after ExxonMobil agreed with
Russia’s Rosneft to develop “tight
oil” reserves in western Siberia, allowing
it access to Russia’s vast oil reserves
in its Artic region by replacing
BP. However, two other energy
companies, Talisman and Marathon
Oil Corp. have also left Poland after
the exploration yielded disappointing
results.
In June 2013, the EU’s highest Court,
the European Court of Justice, issued
a ruling that Poland had violated European
law by allowing licenses to
be issued for the shale gas projects
without fully open tenders.
The Polish government’s promotion
of its large unconventional gas resources
is driven by its energy supply
security concerns and its desire
to reduce its gas imports from Russia
and to build a diversification strategy
for supply sources and imports. Poland’s
Supreme Audit Office (NIK)
has criticized unnecessarily high gas
prices, allegedly because of poorly
conducted negotiations with Gazprom.
Poland’s gas prices rose from
US$331 in 2010 to US$433 per thousand
cubic meters in 2012.
France
After France banned shale gas exploration
in July 2011, the new socialist