"The government is demolishing the wells to prevent a future government from reconsidering its decision to stop producing gas."
As well they should. This country should be electrifying much, much faster. A place literally below sea level is more invested in stopping climate breakdown than most. Sadly the way they're going about it is really a bad hack, and encourages prolonged gas dependency by subsidizing "hybrid" heat pumps (that still require a gas boiler).
I installed heat pumps last spring and it is frustrating that they didn't qualify for any subsidy because they also happen to be air conditioning. And while I might have been able to get a subsidy for an induction hob, there wasn't much point because the one I got for <€200 has been great, and plugged in to a normal outlet. The only trade off is that I can't run all the burners on max power at the same time, and boiling water is _slightly_ slower then when I had a 6kw one.
Hot water is still an issue though. Heat Pump water heaters seem almost unheard of, and I also worry that if I rip out the radiators and the legacy CV Ketel (which I both hate) then it would affect insurability and resale.
Assuming there is no pressing reason and the wells are dormant, why would it be a good idea to destroy options? I did not fact check these claims though. Maybe there are other reasons to close them. But if it is solely do remove them from equation altogether, it is stupid.
Gas HAS to be used as a backup for renewables today (or at least in places without good pumped hydro?). Enough batteries to supply an entire grid for a day or two is just out of reach today.
At least in Australia, I'm not sure how the dynamics go with such a geographically diverse grid like Europe.
> "The government is demolishing the wells to prevent a future government from reconsidering its decision to stop producing gas."
Should there be a reconsideration - they could of course always just drill new wells into the known, proven resource. If they mothballed the existing wells for a few years they would probably need to anyway, or spend piles of money keeping them viable.
The subsidies are a scam that make construction companies more wealthy, there has hardly been a drop in the price you eventually pay imho. I insulated my entire house myself... No subsidy. Ah well, it is more comfortable (though partly we are exchanging the ability to stay warm in winter with that of staying cool in summer).
Insulation helps with both staying warm and cool, though. After all, a big foam beer cooler is just a hollow box of insulation.
I think for a lot of Dutch houses the real issue is draftiness. No amount of insulation fixes that. Hell, the windows have required vents that can't really be closed properly installed per code. I thought the previous owners were quirky but then noticed _all_ the houses have these weird vents at the top of some windows.
Yes but... check the CO2 levels when you close the vents, and watch the water flow from your windows, and see the mold grow on the north wall.
Also, isolation keeps out the heat... Until it is inside, then it keeps it there. I agree it makes air condition more economical, but not many people have them (yet, it's booming).
I think a CO2 meter is an excellent idea, imho it is a good proxy for "air freshness", so also small particles etc. This year I want to try to ventilated more based on CO2 (so close the vents until CO2 becomes unacceptable) and monitor gas use (hooray for Home Assistant).
Nuclear, wind and solar are all pretty old at this point.
Hell, Nuclear is 1940's technology. Are you telling me that the famously industrious Dutch are unable to produce energy without pumping gas out of Groningen?
Destroying own wells only to import gas does nothing to reduce the carbon footprint (it's actually increases it if you'll account emissions from LNG tankers). Efforts should be directed into non-carbon generation and electrification. And if it will be competitive there will be little incentives for the next government to restart the production.
My parents in France replaced their 40 year old gas boiler with a heat pump 5 years ago, half subsidized by the government, then replaced their gas range with induction and got rid of gas altogether. This includes hot water (using a tank). They pay less thanks to France’s cheap nuclear power, help wean the country off foreign energy from unreliable or hostile countries and does good for the environment. What’s not to like?
Yes, but contrary to the Netherlands, France has an electrical network that is able to cope much better with the demand of heat pumps, as many houses have traditionally been heated by electricity.
If anything, using more energy-efficient heat pumps might even decrease the load on the network.
Having just added airco in NL I do worry about this - I actually suspect we could get a _long_ ways with more intelligent timing around power use. Your car can wait to charge while your hob boils a pot of water, etc. House batteries can help a lot with this too of course.
If it's only airco it's perhaps not too bad, as your airco usage will most often be aligned with good solar capacity, and you can compensate with solar panels. (if that's possible for you...)
For solar, starting next year, you'll get less and less money for the energy you give back to the net, so you might as well us it and store it for yourself instead of letting the energy shareholders get rich with your production.
If your unit is also to be used as heat pump, well.. ..things look bleaker globaly in the Netherlands.. Especially if more and more people step over from gas to electric. No sun + cold wave (and therefore an inefficient heat pump) is going to put some people in the cold..
A smarter network could help, if the investments were sufficient. But the problem has been known since the early 2000s, and nothing has been done about it until recently.
I've never found a coherent explanation of what this problem is, as an outsider looking in.
It roughly matches the shape of the American datacenter issue where an uptick in demand that is small compared with the level of extra demand required for EVs and heat pumps and industrial electrification to decarbonise the economy has apparently caused massive problems.
And also the Australian experience where the grid companies would rather curtail solar than sell it cheaply (often because the same companies profit from evening gas prices).
You are then forced to conclude that there was simply no coherent plan for electrification. Decades of planning time utterly squandered.
Probably spent arguing about whether climate change was real.
During my holidays this summer I met, by happenstance, an expert specialized in forecasts modeling, who has been involved in this very problematic, advising the dutch government.
He told me that the problem had been forecast and known since the early 2000s, and that basically nothing was done about it until very recently (think less than 5 years).
The problem was made worse with the privatization of the electricity network, as the incentive to invest in primary net infrastructure was very low.
So it's the classical case of a known problem with no will to invest, combined with successive governments that wash their hands saying "it's privatized, we cannot interfere". (so also with no will to invest)
The problem was foreseen, the plans were made and proposed with actionable steps and real deadlines, and nothing was done because the costs were too high.
And now the short-to-medium term prognosis is bleak, with blackouts a real possibility.
Hmmm. Reminds me of 1999, when I worked for Dutch ISP EuroNet Internet BV, and the legacy telco KPN claimed it did not have capacity on its phone network and needed at least 2 years to connect our modems. Odd that a country whose very existence is predicated on keeping its dam/polder network running, something which has led to a very Japanese-like culture of consensus, allowed such critical networks as the electric grid or phone network to rot.
I have a heat pump system, the hot water works alright.
The only minor issue is during winter months, if the daughter and the wife shower one right after the other, it takes some 40 minutes for the boiler to have hot water again.
Is this a heat pump water heater? That's interesting since they should have a very large tank but also take more than 40 minutes to heat up, usually. A backup resistive element could make this faster of course.
It is. It serves both for heating the radiators and for the warm water in the sinks/shower/dishwasher/laundry, but I understand both to be separated systems fed by the same heat pump.
The boiler is not huge, but it has enough water for 2 or 3 people showering in a row, depending on how quickly that happens and what other things sre using hot water now.
It doesn't take super long to have hot water again, but it depends on how cold it is outside. On colder days it obviously take longer.
> Rather than buy off the Groningers, the cabinet decided to give in to them
This doesn't seem to have been tried. We have similar conversations about e.g. pylons for renewable infrastructure and, at even more heightened levels, data centers. It doesn't seem that bribing people to shut up - sorry, sharing the widespread economic benefits of a decision with those most affected - is on the table at all.
The writer of this hasn't even talked to any of the local population who have been subjected to these earthquakes that destroys the local populations' houses.
Historically, the Dutch government has done extremely little to compensate the Groningers' damage. The Dutch are considered a bad example with regards to how the government is handling the proceeds of fossil fuels. So subjecting anyone to another round of house-destroying earthquakes is surely going to be well compensated this time. /s
The point of the article is to not let the “loser” minority overrule the needs of the majority. On the one hand, greater good. On the other hand, i sympathize with the “losers” who are effectively suffering unjust taking.
Focussing on the relatively low numbers in terms of Richter scale is quite disingenuous. An important piece of additional context is these are very shallow earthquakes, which makes them much more impactful than normal earthquakes on that point of the scale. It seems like such obvious bad faith it stains the whole article.
As a Dutch person I can confirm this article is:
1) Roughly correct chronologically.
2) COMPLETELY devoid of the actual political reasons behind this being done.
> The remaining reserves, some 500 billion cubic metres, are worth around €200 billion at current wholesale prices – enough to pay every single resident of the province €150,000 as compensation and still have 110 billion euros.
So... not enough to buy them homes in Amsterdam and move their factories/schools/jobs? Good thing the citizens fought this. The activity is not economical without seriously endangering your home. I'd bet that if you were willing to give them a good enough deal, most/many people will take it. But there is no good deal here. It's just a collection of wealth (gas) at the expense of the Groningeniens.
This was done for mostly ideological reasons, "green transition" and such. The Dutch economy was dependent on natural gas sales for funding parts of the welfare state. They became a net importer of natural gas and then Ukraine and Iran made the gas prices spike. So the Dutch government is now struggling to fill the natural gas store for household heating and cooking applications for the coming winter season, while also incurring these high costs. The impact hasn't fully played out or understood.
This is just not true. The gas wells caused (and still cause) earthquakes in the Groningen province, peoples homes got damaged, this became political, now gas from Groningen is being phased out.
My opinion is that this is stupid, we have billions of euros of gas in the ground and the house damage is overblown.
I think it was a Russian (or American?) psy op. Europe would be almost self-sufficient with the Dutch and Norwegian fields so they had to be shutdown. All while the storage is at historical lows
Didn't the decisions of past generations lead us to the climate issues we have today? Won't future generations also say the same about our decisions? Why permanently destroy assets that future generations could potentially use when they discover how to make it more environmentally friendly? Seems very shortsighted to me; like we know better than anyone else and our views will never be questioned.
> destroying them doesn't do anything for safety or the environment.
This is correct because cement is not an adequate plug for well decomissioning. Cement cracks and erodes due to groundwater aggressivity, heat stress and other stresses. Over time will lead to leakages. A better alternative would be expansive clays like bentonite but a far more costlier exercise.
At the same time the Dutch gas reserves are at a historic low (current somewhere around 44% of capacity) and are not expected to be filled to capacity before winter comes. It is to be hoped this will be a mild winter or prices - already high - will go through the roof.
Here's an idea for those subsiding gas wells: pump in CO2 on one side, out CH4 the other. That way the pressure is kept up and there should be fewer problems with earthquakes. Someone probably thought of this and decided it wasn't feasible or did not fit the agenda of phasing out fossil fuels like natural gas.
Honestly, “The earthquakes they experienced so far weren’t bad enough” doesn’t sound like a good argument for “let’s keep pumping”. All it takes to make this not worth it is a single bad one.
"It would be good for the current Dutch government to prioritize the interests of the Netherlands and Europe over that of Groningen"
I mean, what the actual f*ck. I LIVE in Groningen and see the results of endless money grabbing of selling the gas of the past decades every day (Shell & the government). People stressed out, thousands of homes that are unsafe, people living in temporary housing for years.
He compares italian earthquakes with ours (we had one last week). This comparison is so wrong on so many levels. First: these ones here a man induced, which is a different category. Second: the soil here is so much different than in Italy, a earthquake with the same force (richter) has a whole different outcome.
My house has (minor) damage as well, I'm compensated for fixing it and I'm happy with the way the government handled it. But this piece of a BS blog and the conclusion are infuriating.
Did the writer even try to speak to anyone living in this region? Or did he just draw some conclusions based behind his desk that's (safely) located in the US?
People are also stressed because of high gas prices, cold swimming pools and offices (19 degrees), industries closing down (chemical sector declined 20% 2022-2023). And not just in Netherlands either
This is so funny my own government shoots itself economically in it's foot. Then they love to complain about unfair disadvantage of other countries especially a very big Asian country. When the economic competition from Asia becomes to much to handle.
Such a shame ! The Netherlands could have followed Norway and store CO2. The CO2 will be useful carrier for hydrogen, to build methanol out of the electrolysers installed in Groningen. Liquid energy carrier are useful because they are easier to handle than gaseous or liquid (cryo-cooled) hydrogen, for application like ocean going vessel.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 3.3 ms ] threadAs well they should. This country should be electrifying much, much faster. A place literally below sea level is more invested in stopping climate breakdown than most. Sadly the way they're going about it is really a bad hack, and encourages prolonged gas dependency by subsidizing "hybrid" heat pumps (that still require a gas boiler).
I installed heat pumps last spring and it is frustrating that they didn't qualify for any subsidy because they also happen to be air conditioning. And while I might have been able to get a subsidy for an induction hob, there wasn't much point because the one I got for <€200 has been great, and plugged in to a normal outlet. The only trade off is that I can't run all the burners on max power at the same time, and boiling water is _slightly_ slower then when I had a 6kw one.
Hot water is still an issue though. Heat Pump water heaters seem almost unheard of, and I also worry that if I rip out the radiators and the legacy CV Ketel (which I both hate) then it would affect insurability and resale.
Assuming there is no pressing reason and the wells are dormant, why would it be a good idea to destroy options? I did not fact check these claims though. Maybe there are other reasons to close them. But if it is solely do remove them from equation altogether, it is stupid.
That being said, I do worry that that outcome of this isn't "stop using gas" but "keep using American LNG", which would be worse.
At least in Australia, I'm not sure how the dynamics go with such a geographically diverse grid like Europe.
Should there be a reconsideration - they could of course always just drill new wells into the known, proven resource. If they mothballed the existing wells for a few years they would probably need to anyway, or spend piles of money keeping them viable.
Because pouring millions of tons of concrete to the ground is very environment friendly.
I think for a lot of Dutch houses the real issue is draftiness. No amount of insulation fixes that. Hell, the windows have required vents that can't really be closed properly installed per code. I thought the previous owners were quirky but then noticed _all_ the houses have these weird vents at the top of some windows.
Also isolation is great unless you open a window xD
Also, isolation keeps out the heat... Until it is inside, then it keeps it there. I agree it makes air condition more economical, but not many people have them (yet, it's booming).
Awnings and window shades are really important here. It's insane we don't have every south facing window with an exterior cover.
You can ventilate a little less when you're generating less pollution in the home.
Some ventilation is still a good idea though.
I think a CO2 meter is an excellent idea, imho it is a good proxy for "air freshness", so also small particles etc. This year I want to try to ventilated more based on CO2 (so close the vents until CO2 becomes unacceptable) and monitor gas use (hooray for Home Assistant).
Hell, Nuclear is 1940's technology. Are you telling me that the famously industrious Dutch are unable to produce energy without pumping gas out of Groningen?
Other "fun fact" it seems the Netherlands uses gas cooktops much more than other European countries.
If anything, using more energy-efficient heat pumps might even decrease the load on the network.
https://dutchtimes.nl/business/connection-ban-in-utrecht-sig...
https://nltimes.nl/2026/02/12/grid-operator-warns-overload-u...
https://nos.nl/artikel/2611522-vol-stroomnet-utrecht-is-een-...
For solar, starting next year, you'll get less and less money for the energy you give back to the net, so you might as well us it and store it for yourself instead of letting the energy shareholders get rich with your production.
If your unit is also to be used as heat pump, well.. ..things look bleaker globaly in the Netherlands.. Especially if more and more people step over from gas to electric. No sun + cold wave (and therefore an inefficient heat pump) is going to put some people in the cold..
A smarter network could help, if the investments were sufficient. But the problem has been known since the early 2000s, and nothing has been done about it until recently.
It roughly matches the shape of the American datacenter issue where an uptick in demand that is small compared with the level of extra demand required for EVs and heat pumps and industrial electrification to decarbonise the economy has apparently caused massive problems.
And also the Australian experience where the grid companies would rather curtail solar than sell it cheaply (often because the same companies profit from evening gas prices).
You are then forced to conclude that there was simply no coherent plan for electrification. Decades of planning time utterly squandered.
Probably spent arguing about whether climate change was real.
He told me that the problem had been forecast and known since the early 2000s, and that basically nothing was done about it until very recently (think less than 5 years).
The problem was made worse with the privatization of the electricity network, as the incentive to invest in primary net infrastructure was very low.
So it's the classical case of a known problem with no will to invest, combined with successive governments that wash their hands saying "it's privatized, we cannot interfere". (so also with no will to invest)
The problem was foreseen, the plans were made and proposed with actionable steps and real deadlines, and nothing was done because the costs were too high.
And now the short-to-medium term prognosis is bleak, with blackouts a real possibility.
The only minor issue is during winter months, if the daughter and the wife shower one right after the other, it takes some 40 minutes for the boiler to have hot water again.
The boiler is not huge, but it has enough water for 2 or 3 people showering in a row, depending on how quickly that happens and what other things sre using hot water now.
It doesn't take super long to have hot water again, but it depends on how cold it is outside. On colder days it obviously take longer.
This doesn't seem to have been tried. We have similar conversations about e.g. pylons for renewable infrastructure and, at even more heightened levels, data centers. It doesn't seem that bribing people to shut up - sorry, sharing the widespread economic benefits of a decision with those most affected - is on the table at all.
Historically, the Dutch government has done extremely little to compensate the Groningers' damage. The Dutch are considered a bad example with regards to how the government is handling the proceeds of fossil fuels. So subjecting anyone to another round of house-destroying earthquakes is surely going to be well compensated this time. /s
Well, it does, because it reduces the chance of additional gas extraction in those areas—which was the goal of filling them with cement.
So... not enough to buy them homes in Amsterdam and move their factories/schools/jobs? Good thing the citizens fought this. The activity is not economical without seriously endangering your home. I'd bet that if you were willing to give them a good enough deal, most/many people will take it. But there is no good deal here. It's just a collection of wealth (gas) at the expense of the Groningeniens.
Still a waste of resources to sabotage pipes that could just as well serve other purposes.
CAES is I think now no longer competitive with batteries, which are a much simpler setup and being widely, quietly, deployed.
Renewable energy: yes, please. Forcing it and tanking the economy, creating poverty: absolutely not.
The area is sinking. Literally:
"The pressure decline in the field causes compaction in the reservoir which is observed as subsidence at the surface."
https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/372/367/2015/piahs-372...
My opinion is that this is stupid, we have billions of euros of gas in the ground and the house damage is overblown.
https://ned.nl/nl/gasopslagen-nederland#:~:text=Verloop%20va...
Never high enough for self sufficiency without major changes that the people close to the money spigot delayed for decades to line their own pockets.
Another resource curse.
This is correct because cement is not an adequate plug for well decomissioning. Cement cracks and erodes due to groundwater aggressivity, heat stress and other stresses. Over time will lead to leakages. A better alternative would be expansive clays like bentonite but a far more costlier exercise.
Here's an idea for those subsiding gas wells: pump in CO2 on one side, out CH4 the other. That way the pressure is kept up and there should be fewer problems with earthquakes. Someone probably thought of this and decided it wasn't feasible or did not fit the agenda of phasing out fossil fuels like natural gas.
https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/372/367/2015/piahs-372...
I mean, what the actual f*ck. I LIVE in Groningen and see the results of endless money grabbing of selling the gas of the past decades every day (Shell & the government). People stressed out, thousands of homes that are unsafe, people living in temporary housing for years.
He compares italian earthquakes with ours (we had one last week). This comparison is so wrong on so many levels. First: these ones here a man induced, which is a different category. Second: the soil here is so much different than in Italy, a earthquake with the same force (richter) has a whole different outcome.
My house has (minor) damage as well, I'm compensated for fixing it and I'm happy with the way the government handled it. But this piece of a BS blog and the conclusion are infuriating.
Did the writer even try to speak to anyone living in this region? Or did he just draw some conclusions based behind his desk that's (safely) located in the US?
You just have to laugh or else you would cry..