Readers will be familiar with the German nuclear phase-out. The Merkel and Scholz governments prematurely shut down twenty gigawatts of nuclear power. Those plants provided energy for38 millionhouseholds forless than twenty percentof the cost of gas. The Scholz government closed one power plant thirteen years before its expected retirement date.
But few know that the Dutch government is doing something similar: it is pouring cement down the country’s gas wells. These wells are already inactive; destroying them doesn’t do anything for safety or the environment. The government is demolishing the wells to prevent a future government from reconsidering its decision to stop producing gas.
The wells are located in Groningen, a province in the north of the country. Prospectors discovered the gas field in 1959 and soon realized it was thelargestin Europe. Over the next 60 years, they extracted 2.2 trillion cubic metres of gas. Groningen earned the treasury lots of money –363 billioneuros – and gave Dutch utilities the ability to generate power without relying on foreign countries.
But gas production in Groningen had local downsides. The field is large, shallow, and crossed by small faults, so extraction caused bits of it to shift. In 1986, the region started experiencing small earthquakes. The majority of these quakes registered beneath 1.5 on the Richter scale, too faint for most people to notice. But a small number exceeded 2.0, and a tiny handful 3.0. The earthquakes led vocal Groningers to demand an end to the drilling
Jesse Frederik, a smart Dutch journalist, hasarguedthat locals greatly exaggerated the harmfulness of the earthquakes.1But even if they hadn’t, there was a good case to keep drilling. The remaining reserves, some 500 billion cubic metres, are worth around €200 billion atcurrent wholesale prices–enough to pay every single resident of the province €150,000 as compensation and still have 110 billion euros.
And while gas alone is not good for the environment, more gas usually results in less coal usage, not less renewable generation. Norway is one of the world’s largest gas exporters despite its sincere concerns about climate change. (The enlightened Norwegians opened seventy more sites for drilling this past May.)
But like many modern Western countries, the Dutch are increasingly unable to pursue policies with huge numbers of winners and small numbers of concentrated losers. Rather than buy off the Groningers, the cabinet decided to give in to them. In 2018, the cabinet promised to end gas production by 2030. In 2019, it accelerated that deadline to 2023.
The concessions to the losers continued. In 2023, a parliamentary commission released a report announcing that the Dutch government had a ‘debt of honour’ to the people of Groningen, and that economic interests had superseded the interests of Groningers for too long. Hans Vijlbrief, the D66 minister responsible, then decided to fill the wells with 500 metres of cement.
The Mining Council opposed the decision: they said that it was possible and preferable to mothball the facilities. The main scientific advisor to the government also opposed the decision: they argued (and continue to argue) that pausing production was no worse for the environment than plugging the wells was, and preserved much greater flexibility for the government in case of geopolitical necessity or economic crisis.
The Groningen gas field still holdstwiceas much gas as the EU has imported from Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At market value, that gas would be worth enough to increase the Netherlands’ aid to the Ukrainian governmentthirteenfold.
But the politics of the ‘debt of honour’ overcame the national and European interest. A specialised machine is now travelling around the province ripping out kilometres of pipes and filling what is left with thousands of tonnes of cement. It has destroyed 70 of the 300 wells this way so far.
This is a story of a few concentrated losers defeating a very diffuse majority of winners. But it is also a story of a government proactively choosing to limit the country’s options.