Why Holland aims to leave $80 billion in the ground

Ger “Gerry” Warink remembers his first time. 

It was 1991 and he was in the restaurant at his family’s hotel, a handsome brick building in the center of this quiet provincial town. He heard the front doors start to rattle, normally a sign that a big truck was passing, but the road outside was empty. “It was a Sunday. I remember it well,” he says. 

It wasn’t a truck, it was an earthquake, caused by the extraction of natural gas from the surrounding flatlands of Groningen, the northernmost province in the Netherlands. It was one of hundreds of tremors that have for decades disturbed the lives of around 85,000 residents living on top of Europe’s largest onshore gas field, damaging their homes and depressing their businesses.

For more than half a century Groningen gas has heated Dutch homes, powered Dutch factories, and helped pay for one of Europe’s most generous welfare states. But now, under public pressure, the government is turning the tap off. The Groningen field is

Going green hits the budget ...... but the gas field hits local homesA deaf ear?No end in sight