The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement(siliconcontinent.com) |
The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement(siliconcontinent.com) |
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.
If anything, using more energy-efficient heat pumps might even decrease the load on the network.
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.
More Fucked Today Than Yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441781 - August 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425005 (citations)
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.
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.
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 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.
Because pouring millions of tons of concrete to the ground is very environment friendly.
Other "fun fact" it seems the Netherlands uses gas cooktops much more than other European countries.
As it stands the local population has little more to show for it than demolished homes and damaged monuments and having an economic disease named after them.
Imagine how that would roughly unfold over a period of 70 years.
Sorry, I'm on mobile and it's a complex issue. This covers a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field#Phasing_ou...
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.
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?
Well, it does, because it reduces the chance of additional gas extraction in those areas—which was the goal of filling them with cement.
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.
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.
Still a waste of resources to sabotage pipes that could just as well serve other purposes.
You just have to laugh or else you would cry..
CAES is I think now no longer competitive with batteries, which are a much simpler setup and being widely, quietly, deployed.
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.
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
Great for politicians on the global speaking circuit to opine how they reduced production and brought down local carbon emissions whilst completely ignoring that offshoring industry means the emissions just happen somewhere else (typically a poorer country with lower/no environmental standards).
Hardly seems to fit with the “we’re all in this together” argument.
You seem to be suggesting this happened for reasons other than extracting and selling all the oil and gas that was there, while also stalling on any domestic moves to burn less fuel, leading to the obvious imbalance.
Even the oil industry when they show graphs of what they describe as "unrealistic" options which involve massive cuts in taxation are only tiny speed bumps on the way to exhausting the reserves.
Meanwhile a single round of wind turbine auctions will save far more gas than that. And be a "green transition".
Given that North sea oil is a finite resource that has already peaked, it cannot form the basis of a long term energy strategy.
It's a good job we offset all of our manufacturing to the likes of China, it's not like they have terrible environmental standards or share an atmosphere with us or anything. It's also a good job we closed our coking coal rich mines to import it from Japan instead [1].
I'm left in utter disbelief that any of this was allowed or condoned, it is nothing short of madness. The UK now finds itself in a position where it is incapable of doing absolutely anything.
It’s moronic that taxes don’t always go down. The government should make money and get a job instead of living off welfare.
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.
Replace Ukraine with Russia and Iran with USA
My opinion is that this is stupid, we have billions of euros of gas in the ground and the house damage is overblown.
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...
Renewable energy: yes, please. Forcing it and tanking the economy, creating poverty: absolutely not.
I generally don’t believe in conspiracies, but not filling the strategic reserves for next winter (each year after the energy shock of a few years ago, they fill the gas storage less) looks like a way to scare the populace into making the electric transition via a government made supply shock.
The government is now going to fill it themselves to levels required for the harshest winter in 30 years. And tax the population to fill it to this completely unnecessary level.
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.
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?
I admit I still have to do the exact math (for which I am in a good position with years worth of Home Assistant data).
If I had money to spare I'd be more idealistic about it really, also because I have a solar-panels + home battery shaped hole in my HA dashboard that hurts me ;)
At least in Australia, I'm not sure how the dynamics go with such a geographically diverse grid like Europe.
Battery boom brings round-the-clock solar closer, Ember says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466337 - August 2026
CATL Secures 2GWh Sodium-Ion Storage Deal with Solarpro for Eastern Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219960 - August 2026
> Solar PV supplied more than 10% of global electricity in the first half of 2026, but generation remains heavily concentrated around midday. Ember says rapidly expanding, cheaper battery storage could shift 34% of new daily solar generation to non-solar hours in 2026, bringing round-the-clock solar closer.
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
UNIGRID's sodium-ion home battery debuts in Europe, US is next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48867257 - July 2026
Ember Energy: EU gas demand set to drop 7% by 2030, making new gas investments risky - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/eu-gas-demand-set-to... - June 17th, 2025
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-...
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.
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.
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).
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.
