The Economist: Down to earth (Shale gas in Poland)

Last week the excitement surrounding the rush for shale gas in Poland was tempered with some unwelcome news.  Seven people were charged with offering or receiving bribes in the allocation of concessions to look for the gas in 2011.

But perhaps more telling than the investigation is what it reveals about Poland's attitude towards what many have hoped will be its new-found resource wealth. For the last few years the country has been getting ever dizzier at the prospect of ending its dependence on Russian gas and becoming a "new Norway". Last summer a US study heightened the fever by suggesting that Poland had 5.3 trillion cubic metres of accessible reserves, more than had been previously estimated.

But some experts, such as Grzegorz Pytel of the Sobieski Institute, a think-tank, have been warning for some time that Poland is as much like gas-rich Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan as it is Norway.

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