OREANDA-NEWS. The Polish oil and gas company PGNiG (Polskne Gurnichestvo Naftovo and Gazovnitstvo, PGNiG) does not plan to conclude long-term contracts with Gazprom in the future. This was announced on Wednesday by the head of the company Petr Wozniak, taking part in the XXIX Economic Forum, which is taking place in southern Poland.

"We have no plans to enter into long-term contracts with a partner called Gazprom", he said, saying that cooperation with a Russian partner "creates risks". As Wozniak recalled, now most of the gas supplied to Polish consumers is "gas under the Yamal contract with Gazprom, whose price is too high". “Much will change in 2022”, he pointed out, as the effect of this treaty will come to an end.

Over the past year, the Polish state has used about 15 billion cubic meters of gas. A third of this volume it produces independently on its territory, and imports the rest. The main gas supplier to Poland is Gazprom, on the basis of a long-term contract with which the country can annually acquire 10.2 billion cubic meters of gas. In 2012, the parties agreed to reduce gas prices by 10%. In 2015, PGNiG filed a claim with Gazprom in an arbitration court in Stockholm, since, according to Warsaw, the price of gas in the current agreement is overstated and doesn't correspond to the situation on the European energy market.

Polish authorities said the country was keen to find a replacement for gas supplies from Russia until 2022, when a long-term contract with Gazprom expired. Possible alternatives include an increase in Poland's purchase of liquefied natural gas, which so far has been supplied in small volumes to the country from the United States and Qatar and regasified at the LNG terminal in the Polish city. Another possibility is the construction of the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline, which is supposed to connect Poland with the Norwegian shelf through Denmark in the project.