The Netherlands has closed the taps of Europe’s largest gas field, located in Groningen in the northeast of the country. It is a facility that can discharge more than 7 billion cubic meters of gas per year through pipes. To clarify, it would be as if Italy had suddenly stopped TAP, the gas pipeline from Azerbaijan to Puglia. So why did the Netherlands decide to stop such a strategic area, especially in the middle of the energy crisis? The answer to this is the cracks that occur in the houses in the region due to increasingly frequent earthquakes. It is precisely due to the extraction activities of the giant deposit.
The last tremor occurred a few hours after the plant, located about fifty kilometers from Groningen, was closed. In the last four decades, authorities have identified more than a thousand earthquakes in the region. Although the tremors never exceeded 3.6 degrees on the Richter scale, the frequency is all the more impressive for a region that has never experienced seismicity. At least until the 1960s, when Groningen gas began flowing into the homes of the Netherlands and neighboring countries such as Belgium.
For the locals, at first it seemed like they had struck gold. At its peak of production, the plant could pump 50 billion cubic meters a year, and Groningen dreamed of returning to the glory of the past, when the town was among the richest centers in the country. But in the 1980s, residents began to associate the increasingly frequent tremors with farting. The earthquakes caused damage to buildings, although not very significant: over 120 thousand official reports were reported over time, leading to compensation claims of 1.15 billion euros.
But it’s not just property damage: According to recent studies, the tremors also caused the onset of physical and mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, as well as headaches, insomnia, palpitations and stomach problems in local people. Such disorders lead to a slightly increased risk of death, for example from cardiovascular disease or suicide, measured in 16 premature deaths per year.
For this reason, residents of the region were not satisfied with the compensation and began to demand the closure of the facility. In 2012, the strongest tremor ever recorded in the country occurred near Huizinge. However, the government decided to stop mining in 2018, with a new shock of 3.4 degrees on the Richter scale. In the first agreement, 2030 was envisaged as the closing year. However, citizens’ protests pushed the government to decide to stop it from October 2023, despite the gas crisis in Russia.
The facility currently stands; gas wells are no longer full. However, the plant was not closed permanently: the government envisaged a transition year; If there is a risk in the country’s energy supply within this year, it may be decided to reactivate the mining process. Experts believe that this possibility is remote for now, but there are also those who underline the risks arising from the closure of the field. To compensate for gas from Groningen, the Netherlands will need to increase its imports of LNG from the United States, thereby increasing its dependence on foreign countries. An alternative would be to restart drilling in the North Sea, but that path is uphill. The third way is to reduce consumption by families and businesses: the Netherlands is pushing to increase the installation of heat pumps to replace old gas boilers. So far, 400 thousand families have this alternative heating system.
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Source: Today IT
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
