Photo: BGNES/EPA
Shell, ExxonMobil and the Dutch government made €429 billion from the exploitation of the Groningen gas field, but left thousands of residents with broken homes and health problems, a parliamentary inquiry has found.
Geological destabilization caused by drilling in Groningen, Europe’s largest natural gas reserve, has led to 1,594 earthquakes and damaged more than 85,000 buildings, a report to the Dutch parliament concluded last week, the Financial Times reported.
Profits attributed to the two major energy companies are 66 billion euros, while the biggest beneficiary of mining is the Dutch budget, which has earned 363 billion euros in revenue over the past 60 years.
“The state and the companies made a lot of money, but they ignored the signals that there was a causal relationship between gas extraction and earthquakes, and when it was proven that this relationship was there, they underestimated the seriousness of how bad these earthquakes were,” said Tom van der Liege, a Green politician who is leading the investigation, told the FT.
“This is a slow-onset disaster. . . the effects are quite large, but due to the inability of our government to act on them, the affected people wait and wait for years and cannot go on with their lives.”
Groningen does not sit on tectonic faults, but drilling has produced earthquakes as high as 3.9 on the Richter scale. At this level, they are generally considered relatively mild tremors.
But due to the nature of the extraction, the tremors were much closer to the surface than natural earthquakes and so would have felt more like a magnitude 5 or higher – closer to the equivalent of the tremors felt in Turkey in recent weeks.
More than 11,880 buildings are still not secured, the report said.
Van der Lee said 10 billion euros had been spent on compensating residents and efforts to strengthen buildings, but that for every 1 euro that went to residents, 70 cents were spent on bureaucracy.
Residents suffered from insomnia and palpitations, while a research report noted that those who lived near the quakes were at risk of premature death.
Groningen is believed to contain around 450 billion cubic meters of usable gas, almost three times what the EU imported from Russia before its invasion of Ukraine.
The drop in Russian gas flows has increased pressure on Dutch authorities to keep Groningen open as EU countries rushed to secure alternative supplies.
However, in October the Netherlands capped production from Groningen at 2.8 bcm for the year – down from 42.5 bcm in 2014 – and said it would end production there this year. A decision on whether to extend the proceedings will be made in June after a debate on the report’s conclusions.
The whole analysis – of Bloomberg TV Bulgaria website
