A consortium comprising French-Italian Saipem, Italy’s Techint, Snamprogetti Canada and Poland’s PBG and PBG Export has been chosen to build the Świnoujscie LNG terminal. The group submitted a bid of zł.2.9 billion, the lowest in the tender.

Warsaw Stock Exchange-listed construction firm PBG holds around 33 percent of the consortium.

“We would like to sign the agreement with the contractor of the LNG terminal in the first half of July,” Zbigniew Rapciak, president of Polskie LNG, said in a statement. “We plan to start construction in September.” The terminal is to be ready by December 2013 and should start operating on June 30, 2014. Its initial capacity is planned at five billion cubic meters of gas a year.

The winning consortium beat out two competitors for the contract. The second-lowest bid – zł.3.1 billion – was made by a South Korean consortium comprising Daewoo Engineering and Construction, Korea Gas Corporation and Daewoo Engineering Company. And the highest offer came from a consortium of Italy’s Tecnimont, Poland’s Polimex Mostostal and France’s Sofregaz, Vinci Construction Grands Projets and Entrepose.

The Świnoujście terminal is a key investment aimed at boosting Poland’s energy security by diversifying sources of gas, which the country mainly imports from Russia.

Poland was originally to receive €380 million (around 60 percent of the cost) in EU funds for the investment, but according to Dziennik – Gazeta Prawna, the European Commission is beginning to doubt the necessity of the project due to the vast shale gas deposits that Poland might be sitting on.

“Large deposits of unconventional gas might make Poland a net exporter,” said Janusz Lewandowski, EC’s budget commissioner. “We have to rethink whether putting money into diversification and energy security in the context of possible extraction of the resource is sensible.”