Fracking on the march in Europe

The Netherlands has a long history exploiting its gas fields.  Now, Matt Steinglass writes in the Financial Times about the steps underway for the Netherlands to exploit its shale gas reserves.  It is amazing how much attention is being given in energy debates in Europe to fracking.  Let’s hope that objectives to move to a low carbon economy and to improve energy efficiency are not lost in this new rush to exploit these fossil fuel reserves.

Fracking: Netherlands moves closer to shale gas exploitation

The Netherlands has moved closer to approving exploitation of shale gas with a government report concluding environmental risks from the process  would be manageable.

The findings address one of the principal obstacles to Dutch parliamentary approval for three trial fracking wells to be drilled late next year, and could prove a critical moment in a Europe that is resistant to the practice.

The report by the consultancies Witteveen and Bos, Arcadis, and Fugro acknowledges the risks but says the possibility of groundwater pollution is “very small”, partly because Dutch shale gas reserves lie much deeper than those in the US, at three to four kilometres rather than 1.5.

Mark Rutte, prime minister, and his centre-right Liberal party want to go ahead with the trials, but their coalition partners, the centre-left Labour party, had opposed fracking until the technique could be proven safe.

The government will negotiate with municipalities where the trial wells are planned in October, and a final decision by parliament is expected early next year. But after sending parliament the assessment report, Henk Kamp, the Liberal minister of economic affairs, was optimistic.

“If shale gas can be exploited in a responsible fashion in the Netherlands, and if we have it in economically interesting quantities, then we should seriously consider doing so,” Mr Kamp said.

With the Dutch Liberals now in favour, the decision of whether or not to approve the fracking trials lies mainly in the hands of the Labour party, the coalition partners of Mr Kamp’s Liberals. Labour members voted against fracking at a party congress in May, but the party leader has said he would support it if research shows it can be done safely.

While opposition to fracking has been relatively muted in the US, where the technique drove a huge boom in natural gas production, it has been much stronger in Europe. Environmentalists worry that it can contaminate groundwater, trigger earthquakes and lead to releases of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

France and Bulgaria have banned fracking altogether, and there has also been strong resistance in some German states. Yet America’s Energy Information Administration puts Europe’s recoverable reserves on a par with America’s.

The Dutch state is eager to ensure the future of its gas revenues, which run to €15bn a year but are expected to decline significantly by 2030 as the huge gasfields in the province of Groningen, first tapped in the early 1960s, peter out. Forty-two per cent of all energy use in the Netherlands comes from gas, an exceptionally high figure.

But opposition to the process used to extract shale gas, known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, is strong among Dutch environmental groups and many local communities, which say their country is too densely populated and too permeated with water for the process to be safe.

A poll of Dutch voters in May by the Dutch pollster Maurice de Hond found 44 per cent against fracking to 35 per cent in favour. Many fear that fracking, which uses pressurised water and chemicals to crack rock formations and release trapped gas, will lead to pollution, as it has in some areas in the US, where the process is widely used.

“We have location-specific problems in the Netherlands,” said Hans Altevoigt, a spokesman for Greenpeace. “We are very densely populated, there is a lot of infrastructure, and we don’t have so much room to carry out experiments.”

Either way, the government plans a long process of gradual testing and step-by-step review before any industrial-scale fracking goes forward. Local municipalities will probably have a veto, as they must issue permits for wells.

This long process of consulting stakeholders was typical of the Dutch process of building social support, said Cory van der Linde, head of the energy programme at the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank.

“It’s not like other countries where they just say ‘let’s do it’,” she said. “We [Dutch] may not be the quickest deciders, but we try to do things carefully.”