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Central European Petroleum (CEP) has announced the largest ever oil discovery in Poland’s history near Wolin Island.

Discovered about six kilometres from Świnoujście, a Baltic Sea port city in Poland’s northwest, the well could hold 22 million tonnes of recoverable crude oil and condensate, along with 5 billion cubic metres of commercial-grade natural gas.

The broader concession area, spanning 593 square kilometres, is estimated to contain over 33 million tonnes of oil and condensate, as well as 27 billion cubic metres of gas.

That would more than double Poland’s current estimated oil reserves, which stood at around 20.2 million tonnes in 2023, according to Polish public broadcaster TVP.

On Monday, CEP asserted that Poland would have priority in benefiting from the oil and gas it produces.

“This is some kind of nonsense” Piotr Woźniak, former CEO of Polish oil and gas company Polskie Górnictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo (PGNiG), said in an interview with Euronews.

According to 2019 data, PGNiG produced 1.2 million tonnes of oil in Poland and abroad.

“The priority is not Poland, it is not Russia, it is not Sudan or the Ivory Coast. The priority is given to whoever discovers the mineral. If it is discovered by this company, it has priority over all others. Except that it must first document the deposit. This is what European law states,” Woźniak said.

“They care about cash, not about any nation. They can sell it to whoever they want. Of course, with all the international considerations, they can’t sell it to the Russians or the Medellin cartel in Colombia either, because everyone would be furious,” he added.

‘Showing off’ in front of a possible buyer

Woźniak said that CEP will want to raise funds as soon as possible.

“It needs to document that deposit of its own so that it has full rights to it and the legal ability to mine it. It has to drill, and to drill, it has to spend money,” he said.

“They’re kind of flaunting themselves here in front of a possible buyer, because they know that we [in Poland] want to have diversification of sources, that we’re betting on — at least from the rationale you hear from the government administration — our own resources,” Woźniak added.

“They should be congratulated because it rarely happens in such quantities, it is all the more reason to congratulate them,” the former CEO of PGNiG said.

Woźniak was critical of the sluggishness of the Polish state-owned company Orlen, which took over PGNiG in 2022 and had a chance to uncover the resources that CEP can now extract.

“Orlen has not produced a single cubic metre of gas and not a single barrel of oil in Poland. For 14 years they did nothing, taking obviously fat money, neither under one government, nor under another, nor under a third. Nothing came of it,” he says.

“How did a company the size of CEP, which fits in a liquor glass, discover huge resources, where was the state then?” asks Wozniak rhetorically, referring to Orlen.

Will it help to become independent from Russia?

According to Woźniak, the extraction of deposits from the wells discovered by CEP will not shake up the European energy balance. Yet Poland itself may do so, he said.

The deposits may reach 22 million tonnes of oil, and, as the expert emphasised, “the processing capacity of Polish refineries is about 24 million tonnes of crude oil a year, which is the amount we are able to process within Poland’s borders”.

Polish energy analyst and journalist Wojciech Jakóbik told Euronews that from “the point of view of a major energy policy — this is not a breakthrough”.

“But from the point of view of investment in the Baltic Sea — yes, because it is several times more than we are currently extracting in the Baltic Sea,” Jakóbik said.

“It is also a positive investment signal that there could be more of these deposits, that it pays to look for raw materials in our basin, so who knows if there won’t be more news on this from other investors.

“Investors have moved to look for hydrocarbons all over Europe. Poland is not isolated. We hear, for example, that Germany, in cooperation with the Dutch, wants to extract hydrocarbons in the North Sea and beyond.

“This is further evidence that we have a change in Europe. Tough security is making us look again more favourably at gas and oil extraction from Europe,” Jakóbik added.