Natural gas and crude oil

Deposits of natural gas in Poland occur mainly in the Polish Lowland: in the Wielkopolska region and the North Pomerania and in the Carpathian Foreland. Small resources of natural gas are also found in the Carpathians and in the Polish economic zone of the Baltic Sea.

These data do not include natural gas deposits where the content of nitrogen exceeds 90%. The resources of the exploited deposits amounted in 2003 to 130,460 million cubic metres, which makes up about 85.5 % of all recoverable resources. Of the 245 natural gas deposits 184 are being exploited. The resource figures given here include gas reserves of deposits that were excluded from production and used for gas storage. The gas left in the deposit is treated as a gas cushion (buffer capacity) and it will not be recovered as long as the gas store is in use. In 2003 natural gas production from deposits of proven and probable reserves amounted to 4,916 million cubic metres and was the same as in the previous year. The contributions of the individual regions were as follows: Lowland: 67.1 %, Carpathian Foreland: 31.7 %, Carpathians: 0.7 %, Baltic: less than 0.5 %.

Prospective resources of natural gas were estimated a few years ago at 650 billion cubic metres. There are indications that new deposits could be discovered and that a larger portion of the national demand could be covered from domestic sources. Commercial reserves of natural gas are estimated at 80,463 million tons cubic metres.

There are 86 crude oil deposits in Poland, of that 35 are in the Carpathians, 11 in the Carpathian Foreland (Carpathian Depression), 39 in the Polish Lowland and 1 in the Polish economic zone of the Baltic Sea.

In 2003 the recoverable reserves of crude oil in the Lowland constituted 74.9 % of the total domestic reserves, Baltic reserves - 20.6 %, Carpathian reserves - 2.3 %, Carpathian Foreland reserves - 2.2 %. The exploited resources contain 96.6 % of the total domestic resources. In 2003 crude oil and oil condensate production from on-shore and off-shore deposits of proven and probable capacity amounted to 753.26 thousand tons. In relation to the previous year production from on-shore deposits increased by more than 40 thousand tons. Balance resources of crude oil amount to 15,182 million tons, whereas recoverable reserves amount to 12,650 million tons. Domestic crude oil production covers only a minute part of the national demand.