LONDON — Chevron said on Friday that it would abandon efforts to find and produce natural gas from shale rock in Poland, in perhaps the biggest setback yet to fledgling efforts to start a European shale oil and gas industry that might help replace the region’s dwindling fuel resources.
Shale development in the United States has been one of the reasons the American energy industry has experienced a renaissance in recent years — so much so that it has contributed to the global glut now depressing oil prices. But Europe, heavily reliant on imported fuel, has had trouble getting started with shale, for geological, environmental and political reasons.
Chevron announced it was abandoning the Poland project the same day the company reported that its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2014 fell nearly 30 percent compared with a year earlier, to $3.5 billion. The company blamed lower oil prices for much of the damage.
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Mr. Pienkowski noted that the wells drilled in Poland so far amounted to a tiny fraction of those drilled in the United States, and he said that the few drillers remaining in the game now knew how to better target their efforts, giving some hope of future success.
Mr. Pienkowski conceded that at best Poland was likely to have some “isolated” production areas rather than one big continuous shale belt as originally hoped. The industry has learned “a tough lesson that cost a lot of money.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 31, 2015, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Chevron to Abandon Shale Natural Gas Venture in Poland. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
