ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that shale gas in Poland constitutes a particularly important energy object, valued mainly as a strategic resource for the economy and Poland’s energy security. In 2011, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA 2011) published an assessment of natural gas and oil resources in shale rock formations worldwide. According to the report, Poland had the second largest reserve of unconventional natural gas resources of all European countries, second only to France. With these numbers shale gas entered energy politics in Poland as a potentially highly valuable resource. However, given its materiality – shale gas being trapped over three thousand metres below the surface – significant capital and expertise needed to be invested in order to transform it into a resource, which in the end failed. Moreover, through EU membership, shale gas is contextualized by the energy security–climate change nexus and other environmental concerns. EU institutions played an important role in bringing these extra-economic and extra-security valuations of shale gas to the forefront. The short history of shale gas exploration in Poland – a couple of years of debates and subsoil activities – places Poland in the new context of resource politics. In this chapter, I argue that an interesting dependency is created: all knowledge-producing actors depend on capital investment in resource exploration. Without this involvement, there is no data to operate on, to make plans or predictions about the economic and environmental future of the project. In other words, global capital is an important part of co-production of the different kinds of expertise about the resource and the resource itself.
