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PL / EN
Energy 20 March, 2018 11:00 am   
COMMENTS: Mateusz Gibała

Polish Briefing: Poles talk about LNG in the USA. Wintershall will not receive compensation from PGNiG

What goes on in Poland on the 20th of March.

Minister Naimski will talk about LNG in the US and more

In the coming days, the Government Plenipotentiary for strategic energy infrastructure Piotr Naimski will visit the United States. He will take part in Energy Exports Week, during which events in Washington and Houston will take place.

On Monday 19 March, the minister took part in the discussion on the development of global gas infrastructure in Washington. On March 22 he will visit the third Transatlantic Energy Security Forum. Naimski supervises the work of strategic energy infrastructure operators, including Gaz-System, responsible for transmission pipelines and the LNG terminal in Świnoujście.

In 2017, PGNiG was the first company in Central and Eastern Europe to import LNG from the United States. It also signed a futures contract for the supply of this raw material with the British Centrica. Piotr Naimski declares that in 2022 Poland wants to have full freedom to choose a gas supplier. The long-term contract with the Russian Gazprom, which Poles want to replace with another, more flexible solution, taking into account the possibility of abandoning supplies from Russia in general. This is to ensure, besides the terminal, the planned Baltic Pipe gas pipeline from Norway.

The Nord Stream 2 partner will not receive compensation from PGNiG

Gazprom’s partner in the construction of Nord Stream 2 sees no reason to demand compensation from PGNiG for the claim that the Polish company filed regarding the use of the OPAL gas pipeline by the Russians (land-based Nord Stream 1 branch – ed.).

– No legal basis was found to recover lost income from not using the full capacity of the OPAL gas pipeline, which was the result of a PGNiG lawsuit – said the president of Wintershall Holding Mario Meren in an interview with the Interfax agency.

Until 2016, the Russian monopoly could use only 50 percent of the capacity of the said bus. Other transmission capacity has been reserved for other suppliers. The decision of the Commission was not accepted by PGNiG and the Polish government, which appealed against it to the General Court of the European Union. As part of the proceedings, the Court took measures to suspend the implementation of the Commission’s decision. On July 21, 2017, the Court of the European Union dismissed Poland and PGNiG’s request to suspend the implementation of the decision of the European Commission regarding the auction of 50 percent of OPAL gas transmission capacities. A few days later, a similar decision was made by the court in German Düsseldorf. On December 14 last year, the European Union Court, due to formal reasons, rejected PGNiG Supply & Trading’s complaint regarding the annulment of the decision of the European Commission.