Poland’s parliament took one of its first steps towards opening up its natural gas market, passing a bill late on Friday that allows potential rivals to keep required reserves anywhere in the European Union.
The new law, which will come into effect after 30 days, aims at liberalising gas storage regulations, which at the moment effectively ensure a dominant position for PGNiG .
Until now, companies willing to enter the 14-billion-cubic-metre (bcm) gas market could only keep obligatory reserves in Poland, where PGNiG controls all the storage capacity.
Any company that wants to trade larger volumes of gas on the Polish market currently has to either build its own storage facilities or rent them from the monopoly, which has been reluctant to grant access to its facilities.
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