Poland's president expects Caspian oil, gas deliveries via Ukraine pipeline to start in 2012

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski expects crude-oil and natural-gas deliveries from the Caspian, via a pipeline across Ukraine from the Black Sea port of Odessa to the city of Gdansk in Poland and on to Western Europe, to start in 2012.

The president named 2012 as the date agreed on during the weekend's energy summit in Krakow, southern Poland, for the launch of deliveries of Caspian oil and gas to Europe in an interview with Polish daily Dziennik Monday.

Yes, it is 2012, he said. We will be ready no earlier than around 2012.
The participants of the May 11-12 Krakow energy summit, hosted by President Kaczynski and attended by the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania and Ukraine, as well as a special envoy of Kazakhstan, agreed to set up a working group to study the extension and reversal of the Odessa-Brody pipeline - which currently carries Russian crude southwards to the Black Sea port of Odessa - to the Polish city of Plock, from where it would connect to an existing pipeline to Gdansk.

During the first phase we have to construct our part of the Odessa-Brody pipeline. I mean the 100 km long [part of the pipeline] to [Poland's] Adamow, Kaczynski said. By 2012 the Polish section of the pipeline should be ready.

Kaczynski said he expects EU representatives to be present during another summit in Vilnus, Lithuania, at which the Krakow summit's project may be presented.

First we had to convince our friends that we can do something together, Kaczynski said. Now there is time for the EU. I think at the second part of the energy summit, in autumn, in Vilnus, high EU officials will be present.
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