ZG Sobieski — szyb Grzegorz Jaworzno · Województwo śląskie · Poland

Zakład Górniczy Sobieski traces its origins to the earliest coal workings in Jaworzno. In 1766 the first Polish coal mine was opened in the village of Szczakowa, on what is now the territory of Jaworzno, under the patronage of King Stanisław August Poniatowski. Exploitation was intermittent and small-scale. Further workings were developed in the 1790s by Count Moszczyński and by the Austrian entrepreneur Krzysztof Ried, whose mine eventually became known as Fryderyk August. In 1869 the mining fields in the Rudna Góra area of the village of Jeleń (now part of Jaworzno) were acquired by the Lwów merchant Robert Dohms, who obtained rights to prospect and extract coal. Following the death of Dohms senior, his son Robert Wilhelm leased the mine for ten years from 1896. The lessee Juliusz Przeworski sank a deep shaft named Juliusz and introduced electric power to the mine for the first time in the Jaworzno region. The shaft served two levels at depths of 35 and 76 metres.

After the lease expired in 1906, Belgian capital from a joint-stock company in Verviers acquired the mine and financed the sinking of a new primary shaft named Sobieski. This shaft was linked underground to the deepened Juliusz shaft, which was converted to ventilation use. By 1905 output had reached 57,600 tonnes per year; by 1909 it had grown to 96,700 tonnes. A mine power station of 800 kW was built in 1906. In 1909 the old Dohms mine was formally liquidated and the enterprise reconstituted under the name of its new principal shaft as kopalnia Sobieski. Output reached nearly 400,000 tonnes in the last year before the First World War. In 1923 a majority of shares was acquired by the German concern Giesche SA. In 1926 Giesche SA was itself bought out by American capital, forming the Silesian American Corporation (SACO), with 51% held by a group including Averell Harriman and the Anaconda Mining Corporation, and the mine operated under the name Bory during this period. In 1942, during the German wartime occupation, the mine's assets passed to the Giesche Erwerben concern based in Wrocław; the principal Sobieski shaft was renamed Ganse.

After the Second World War the mine was nationalised. Zakład Górniczy Sobieski in its current form was established on 4 November 1998 on the basis of the productive assets of the Kopalnia Węgla Kamiennego Jaworzno, initially as the Zakład Górniczo-Energetyczny Sobieski Jaworzno III. In 2005 this entity merged with the Janina mine in Libiąż to form Południowy Koncern Węglowy S.A. In 2007 PKW became part of the TAURON group, and from 2014 the operating company was known as TAURON Wydobycie. Following the separation of the mining assets from TAURON in 2023, the company reverted to the name Południowy Koncern Węglowy S.A.

The decision to sink Szyb Grzegorz was linked to the need to provide independent shaft access to the Dąb coal deposit, located approximately 9.5 kilometres by underground route from the existing Sobieski shaft infrastructure. The Dąb deposit has an industrial resource base of approximately 167 million tonnes of low-chlorine coal suitable for combustion at the 910 MW power unit at Elektrownia Jaworzno, connected to ZG Sobieski by a dedicated railway of approximately 4 kilometres. The mining concession for the Dąb deposit was granted until 31 December 2063, the longest-running coal extraction concession in Poland.

Preparatory works for Szyb Grzegorz commenced in 2017. The site is in the Byczyna district of Jaworzno. Geological investigations revealed highly waterlogged conditions to a depth of 465.33 metres, requiring the shaft to be sunk using the ground-freezing method. Forty freeze holes were drilled to a depth of 485 metres, and active freezing began in October 2018. The permanent steel headframe, manufactured by Węglokokos Huta Pokój of Ruda Śląska, weighs approximately 600 tonnes; during the sinking phase it stands 35 metres tall, rising to its final height of 52 metres on completion. The first bucket of spoil was raised on 4 July 2019, marking the start of active sinking. The project is the first in Polish hard coal mining to use a final headframe throughout the sinking phase, and the first to apply ground freezing in a coal shaft for thirty years.

Work on the project slowed significantly in 2020–21 during negotiations between the then-investor TAURON Wydobycie and the contractor Przedsiębiorstwo Budowy Szybów SA over terms of continuation. Sinking resumed in June 2022. In November 2023 the shaft had reached a depth of 333 metres. On 25 April 2025 ventilation connection between the sinking shaft and the existing underground workings at the 540-metre level was achieved. Completion of sinking to the final depth of 591.2 metres was planned for the first quarter of 2026. A second phase, equipping the shaft for personnel and materials transport, was in design at the time of the latest available information.