Poland plans to host int'l Caspian crude oil summit

"This is a great strategic venture," announced Polish Presidnt Lech Kaczynski after his meeting with his Ukrainian countpart Viktor Yushchenko in the northern Polish city of Plock.

Kaczynski stressed he was "very optimistic" about plans to complete the Odessa-Brody-Plock oil pipeline to bring Caspian crude oil to Poland.

The project is aimed at lowering Polish, Ukrainian and Georgian dependency on Russian energy sources.

The Odessa-Brody pipeline was finished in 2002.

The extension project from Brody to Plock will make it possible to deliver Caspian crude to Poland and then to other Baltic states.

Estimated costs of the Plock-Brody phase of the planned pipeline connecting Poland and Ukraine hover around 500 million euros.

Warsaw hopes to use European Union infrastructural funds to complete the Brody-Plock leg of the project which it views as strategic in terms of its energy policy.

The completed pipeline would supply PKN Orlen, Central Europe's leading fuels refiner and distributor, with Caspian crude.

Based in Plock, the company which is still partly owned by the Polish state operates in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic and is also in the process of purchasing Lithuania's leading refiner Mazeikiu Nafta.

There are also plans for an extension of the pipeline from Plock to the Polish Baltic Sea port city of Gdansk from where fuel could be shipped to Germany and to other EU states further west.

Polish companies have yet to gain access to oil supplies in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

President Kaczynski is due to visit energy-rich Kazakhstan later this month. IRNA