The Polish government may ask the European Commission to help negotiate additional natural gas deliveries with Russia, Polish daily Rzeczpospolita reported Monday.
"Getting the European Union interested in it is one of the possible scenarios," Maciej Wozniak, chief energy aide to Polish prime minister, says in the report.
The country will negotiate on its own until the end of October; if it fails to sign an agreement by then, it may experience natural gas shortages as early as this year, the daily said.
Poland has been hoping since the beginning of the year to compete the talks with Russia on additional gas supplies.
The country needs to buy more natural gas from 2010, and its gas monopoly PGNiG (PGN.WA) is in negotiations with Russian energy giant OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) to increase supplies.
Poland is also short of natural gas this year. As a result of the Russian-Ukrainian gas conflict in the beginning of the year, Gazprom-linked gas trader RosUkrEnergo, which has in recent years supplied Poland with 2.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, lost access to its gas sources and stopped delivering to Poland via Ukraine.
PGNiG earlier this year signed a short-term contract with a Gazprom unit for an additional 1 billion cubic meters of gas this year.