The board of directors of Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom sees no immediate reason for developing shale gas production in Russia, says the company’s news release following a meeting of the board of directors on Thursday.

The directors agreed that shale gas production in Russia still looks not feasible at the moment. “The main reasons are the considerable reserves of natural gas, whose production costs are far lower than that of gas that may be extracted from shale rock, and the negative effects of shale gas production on the environment,” the news release says.

Gazprom directors took note of such trends in the shale gas industry in 2013-2014 as a slowdown in the growth of shale gas production in the United States and the lack of any progress in its development in countries outside North America.

Most experts believe Poland’s shale gas production experience was unsuccessful. Most of the hopes for shale gas industry development in Europe had been associated with that country. In 2014, several international operators formally declared they were giving up efforts to push ahead with their shale gas projects in that country. The extraction of commercially significant amounts of gas from shale rock in Poland is very improbable in the medium term.

At the moment full or regional moratoriums on hydraulic fracturing of shale seams are effective in France, Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and other European countries, as well as some states in Australia. Such a moratorium is in place in the state of New York, the area of one of the United States’ largest shale formations, Marcellus.