|
Poland Oil and Gas
After rising sharply in the early 1970s, domestic oil
production dropped and remained at about 350,000 tons per
year
into the 1980s because no new deposits were discovered.
Domestic
oil had never accounted for more than 5 percent of total
consumption, but even this figure had dropped sharply by
1980.
Under these circumstances, the Soviet Union supplied
between 80
percent and 100 percent of Poland's imported oil, with
some
purchases from the Middle East when market conditions
permitted.
Poland received Soviet oil through the Druzhba Pipeline,
which
remained the chief source of imported oil in early 1992.
The line
supplied the major refinery at Plock. Oil arriving by ship
from
other sources was processed at a refinery near Gdansk
(see
fig. 14). In 1992, however, the pattern of Polish oil imports
changed
markedly. Because the Druzhba Pipeline was considered
subject to
political pressure and delivery taxes by the countries
through
which it passed, and because Russian crude oil was high in
environmentally undesirable sulfur, Poland cut imports
from that
source from 63 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 1992. The
gap was
to be filled by North Sea (British and Norwegian) oil
imports,
which rose from 19.5 to 26 percent in 1991, and by the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
imports,
which rose from 17.5 to 38 percent in 1992. To accommodate
more
North Sea oil, the transloading capacity of the North
Harbor
facility at Gdansk was doubled in 1992.
Domestic natural gas provided a much higher percentage
of
national consumption than did domestic oil. Although
pipeline
imports of gas from the Soviet Union rose sharply in the
1970s
and early 1980s, reaching 5.3 billion cubic meters in
1981,
domestic output remained slightly ahead of that figure.
Domestic
natural gas exploration was pursued vigorously in the
1980s, but
equipment shortages hampered the effort. By 1991, however,
Polish
experts declared the country potentially self-sufficient
in
natural gas; in 1990 and 1991, large-scale agreements with
United
States firms brought about new exploration in Silesia and
made
possible extraction of gas from Poland's many intact coal
seams.
New domestic gas sources opened the prospect of reducing
reliance
on coal and saving the hard currency spent on the 7
billion cubic
meters of gas imported (mostly from the former Soviet
Union) in
1991. No natural gas was imported from the West in 1991,
nor did
plans for 1992 call for such imports. At the end of 1991,
a new
agreement with Russia maintained both oil and gas
deliveries from
that country at approximately their previous levels. (Some
5
million tons of oil were delivered from Russia in 1991.)
At the
same time, plans called for linkage of Polish and German
gas
lines as early as 1993, making Poland's gas supply more
flexible.
Data as of October 1992
|
