Conference - The Future of Baltic Energy Security

pipeline project as well as discuss Northern Gate, an alternative energy transit corridor championed by Poland that will open up the region to Norwegian gas supplies and U.S. and international LNG shipments, blunting Gazprom's market monopoly position. In addition to bringing together some of the leading experts on this issue from Europe and the United States, the conference will feature a keynote speech by Secretary of State Piotr Naimski, a Member of the Polish Sejm and the Government Plenipotentiary for Strategic Energy Infrastructure at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. Other key speakers will include Colin Cleary, the Director for Energy Diplomacy for Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa, at the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Matthew Bryza, as well as CEOs of the Polish energy companies PERN and Gaz-System, Tomasz Stępień and Igor Wasilewski, respectively.
 
Agenda
Registration 9:30 A.M.–10:00 A.M.
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Welcome 10:00 A.M.
Glen E. Howard President, The Jamestown Foundation
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Panel One: Energy Supply and its Geopolitics in the Baltic
10:10 A.M.–11:45 A.M
 
“Germany’s Nord Stream Dilemmas: Economics and Politics” 
Vladimir Socor
Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation
 
“Russia and Nord Stream Two: The Effects on Baltic Security”
Margarita Assenova
Director of Programs for the Balkans, Caucasus & Central Asia, 
The Jamestown Foundation
 
“United States Perspective on Nord Stream Two”
Benjamin Schmitt
Energy Analyst, Bureau of Energy Diplomacy, U.S. Department of State
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Lunch
11:45 A.M.–12:30 P.M.
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Keynote Address
12:30 P.M.—1:40 P.M.
 
Piotr Naimski
Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, and
Government Plenipotentiary for Strategic Energy Infrastructure
 
Colin Cleary (comments off the record)
Director for Energy Diplomacy for Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa, Bureau of Energy Resources, U.S. Department of State
 
Commentator: Matthew Bryza
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia
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Coffee Break
1:45 P.M.–2:00 P.M.
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Panel Two: The Baltic Pipe Project: Poland’s Energy Strategy in the Baltic Region
2:00 P.M.–3:00 P.M.
 
Tomasz Stępień
CEO, GAZ-SYSTEM, S.A. Poland 
 
Mateusz Henryk Wodejko
Vice President of the Management Board, PERN S.A.
 
Moderator: Matthew Czekaj
Program Associate for Europe and Eurasia, The Jamestown Foundation
*      *      *
Closing Remarks
3:00 P.M.–3:30 P.M.
“The Role of Oil in Regional Energy Security”
 
Igor Wasilewski
CEO, PERN, S.A. Poland
*      *      *
Conclusion
3:30 P.M.
 
Participant Biographies
 
Margarita Assenova
Margarita Assenova is Director of Programs for the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia at The Jamestown Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the Jamestown publication Eurasia Daily Monitor on political and energy security developments in the Balkans and Central Asia. She is also the Chair (contract) of Southeast Central Europe Area Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State. Assenova is a recipient of the John Knight Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University for her reporting on nationalism in the Balkans. Her articles appeared in U.S. and European newspapers, magazines, and online publications. Assenova authored book chapters and journal articles on security, energy, and democracy published by CSIS Press, Brassey’s, Freedom House, Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, and University of New Haven. She has delivered presentations and papers to conferences and panels in the U.S., UK, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Israel, Germany, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
 
Matthew Bryza
Ambassador Matthew Bryza is a member of the board of the Jamestown Foundation. He is the director of the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. He completed a 23-year career as a U.S. diplomat, over half of which was spent at the center of policy-making and international negotiations on major energy infrastructure projects and regional conflicts in Eurasia. His most recent assignment was as U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan from February 2011 to January 2012. Between 2005 and 2009, Bryza served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for Eurasian Energy, the South Caucasus, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. Bryza simultaneously served as the U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE’s Minsk Group mediating the Karabakh conflict, and as U.S. mediator of the Cyprus, South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts.
From 2001 to 2005, Bryza served in the White House as Director for European and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council Staff. His responsibilities included Eurasian energy, the South Caucasus, Central Asia and political Islam in Eurasia. Previous assignments include Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Energy, Advisor on Economic Reform in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and Russia Desk Officer at the State Department, as well as Political Officer at the U.S. Missions to Russia (1995–97) and Poland (1989–91). Currently, Ambassador Bryza resides in Istanbul, Turkey, where he also works as a consultant on business and democratic development and is a board member of several private companies.
 
Colin Cleary
Colin Cleary serves as Director for Energy Diplomacy for Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa in the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources. From 2016 to 2018, he represented the State Department as Chair of an interagency body charged with identifying intelligence gaps. Mr. Cleary served as Political Counselor at U.S. Embassy Kyiv and Science Counselor at U.S. Embassy Moscow. Other Embassy assignments include Madrid, Warsaw, Kampala and Mexico City. Mr. Cleary has been a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown.  
 
Matthew Czekaj
Matthew Czekaj is a Program Associate for Europe and Eurasia at The Jamestown Foundation and also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Jamestown’s daily publication, the Eurasia Daily Monitor. Prior to joining Jamestown, Mr. Czekaj was a Research Associate at the Atlantic Council, where he worked on issues of European Enlargement. Before that, he was a Research Assistant at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) Energy Security Program. Mr. Czekaj holds a Master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations with a concentration in European Studies from Johns Hopkins University.
 
Piotr Naimski
Piotr Naimski is the Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland as well as the Government Plenipotentiary for Strategic Energy Infrastructure. He is a Polish politician, academic teacher, opposition activist during the Communist era in Poland, a publicist, former deputy minister of economy, and a member of the Sejm (lower chamber of parliament during the VII and VIII terms. In 2015, he was named Secretary of Statein the Prime Minister’s Chancellery and the Government’s Plenipotentiary for Strategic Energy Infrastructure.
 
Benjamin Schmitt
Dr. Benjamin Schmitt serves as the European Energy Security Advisor at the Bureau of Energy Resources, in the U.S. Department of State. Since 2015, Benjamin has served as a European energy security and science and technology policy advisor for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Energy Resources (ENR), where he also has served as the IEEE Department of State Science and Technology Policy Fellow. In his role at the State Department, Schmitt focuses on European energy security and diplomacy engagement across the Eurasian region, to develop and implement novel policy strategy for the advancement of joint U.S. and EU shared priorities at the intersection of energy security, national security, and geopolitics, while directly advising senior officials from the State Department and the White House National Security Council, among others across the U.S. Government.
Previously, Schmitt served as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow while pursuing doctoral physics research at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on direct imaging of the Cosmic Microwave Background in support of experimental cosmology research goals. Schmitt completed his Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy in June 2018. While at Penn, Benjamin’s graduate research primarily concentrated on the development of novel millimeter-wavelength imaging technologies framed through the design and integration of ACTPol, a polarization-sensitive receiver upgrade for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, located at over 5,190 meters in elevation on an extinct stratovolcano in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where Schmitt helped lead field deployment operations over a several-year period. Benjamin’s ACTPol research was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program award. An accomplished opera singer, Schmitt has also previously served as a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellow to the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and before that served as an X-Ray Diagnostics Researcher focusing on inertial confinement fusion research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern German Languages and Cultures, and Mathematics.
 
Vladimir Socor
Vladimir Socor is a Senior Fellow of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and its flagship publication, Eurasia Daily Monitor (1995 to present), where he writes analytical articles on a daily basis. An internationally recognized expert on former Soviet-ruled countries in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, he covers Russian and Western policies there, focusing on energy policies, regional security issues, secessionist conflicts, and NATO policies and programs.
Mr. Socor is a frequent speaker at U.S. and European policy conferences and think-tank institutions. He is a regular guest lecturer at the NATO Defense College and at Harvard University's National Security Program’s Black Sea Program (Kennedy School of Government). He is also a frequent contributor to edited volumes. Mr. Socor was previously an analyst with the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (1983–1994). He is a Romanian-born citizen of the United States based in Munich, Germany.
 
Tomasz Stępień
Tomasz Stępień is an experienced manager with a successful track-record in the energy sector. He is the CEO of GAZ-SYSTEM since December 2015.
He has worked in various positions in GAZ-SYSTEM since 2008. He was responsible for coordination of the construction of the Świnoujście LNG terminal and supervision of Polskie LNG (GAZ-SYSTEM’s SPV). He also managed the Department for Analysis, where he was actively involved in the development of GAZ-SYSTEM’s strategy. Then, he was appointed as a Project Manager for the underground gas storage development.
In the period of 2007-2008 he worked in PGNIG, where he was responsible for major diversification projects such as LNG terminal in Świnoujście and Baltic Pipe.
In 2005-2007 Mr. Stępień was Deputy Director of the Department for Energy Supply Diversification at the Ministry of Economy, where he was responsible for the development Polish Government’s policies for oil and gas sector. In parallel, he supervised the implementation of the above strategic documents by the market participants. On behalf of the Ministry of Economy, he participated in the development of the 2007-2013 Operational Programme of the Infrastructure and Environment in the area of energy security. He was a member of the Supervisory Boards of Nafta Polska (Vice Chairman) and of BSiPG Gazoprojekt.
Mr. Stępień is a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
 
Igor Wasilewski
Igor Wasilewski is the CEO of PERN, S.A., and an effective manager with over 20 years of experience in the energy industry. A graduate of Warsaw University of Technology, University of Warsaw and Warsaw School of Economics, he has an MBA Diploma from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and has participated in many international training seminars (Germany, France, England, Italy). Mr. Wasilewski held management positions at GPEC (2010–2015), GAZ-SYSTEM (2006–2009, 2004–2006), PGNiG (1998–2004), and PSE (2010). He created and successfully implemented business strategies that significantly boosted financial results, optimized the operational functioning of the companies, launched investment programs (PLNG), changed the organizational culture of the companies (MBO, coaching, mentoring, job rotation) implemented advanced IT technologies (FFA, ERP, GIS, Workflow , Scada, billing), centralized the structure of the capital groups, introduced new products to the market, as well as oriented the operation of the companies to the needs of customers.
 
Mateusz Henryk Wodejko
A graduate from Finance and Banking Faculty at the Warsaw School of Economics and Warsaw University, Mateusz Henryk Wodejko also completed post-graduate studies in Company Accounting and Finance at Warsaw School of Economics. Before his appointment to the position of Vice President of the PERN S.A. Management Board, he held the position of CFO at “Operator Logistyczny Paliw Płynnych” sp. z o.o. (Logistic Operator of Liquid Fuels, Ltd.). In the year 2016 and in the years 2006–2007, he was employed at Polskie Górnictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo Capital Group (PGNiG Capital Group). Prior to PGNiG, he also worked for, inter alia, GK BOŚ, UKNF, NBP and the City Hall of Warsaw. He has sat on a number of supervisory boards of capital companies, and completed numerous training courses in a number of different areas, including financial accounting, financial revision, tax law, public procurement, data protection.