Natural gas drilling off Borkum fully approved

The Dutch company One-Dyas has now obtained all the necessary permits to implement its N05-A gas production project off Borkum. The Lower Saxony State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology (LBEG) has now approved the sub-project "Directional drilling from the N05-A platform into the German sector of the North Sea, including natural gas extraction in German territory". This allows One-Dyas to drill horizontal wells deep below the seabed and extract natural gas. The company plans to supply the first natural gas from there to households in Germany and the Netherlands at the end of 2024.

One-Dyas wants to extract the gas around 20 kilometers north of Schiermonnikoog and Borkum. The gas fields are partly located in Dutch and German waters. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs had approved the extraction of a total of 14.2 billion Nm³ of natural gas over 35 years and the construction of a drilling platform for this purpose. In addition, there is a license for the construction of a pipeline and a power cable.

In April of this year , at the request of German and Dutch environmentalists, a court in Den Haar ordered a temporary halt to the construction of the project on the grounds that the environmental permit was inadequate. At the beginning of June, the highest administrative court in the Netherlands, the Council of State, temporarily suspended the permit for the offshore work. Eight days later, the court ruled that it saw no reason to suspend the work until the appeal had been decided.

1500 to 4000 meters below the seabed

The German planning approval procedure concerned whether the boreholes may enter German territory at a depth of at least 1500 meters below the seabed and whether natural gas may subsequently be extracted through them, explains the LBEG. These directional boreholes would not run vertically in German territory and would not penetrate the seabed, but would instead run at a depth of 1500 to 4000 meters below the seabed, initially in an arc and then almost horizontally.

In the Dutch approval process, the construction and operation of platform N05-A in the Dutch territorial sea had already been approved. The drilling of the wells and the extraction of natural gas on Dutch territory, the construction and operation of a natural gas pipeline to transport the extracted natural gas and the laying of the power cable from platform N05-A to the Dutch-German border were also approved.

Protest camp on the North Sea

An alliance consisting of Deutsche Umwelthilfe, the Dutch environmental organization Mobilisation for the Environment (MOB) and the citizens' initiative Saubere Luft Ostfriesland (Clean Air East Frisia) filed a lawsuit against the project. It fears that the drilling will have environmental consequences for the island of Borkum, the North Sea and the nearby Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park. It also fears that this will increase dependence on natural gas.

At the end of July, Greenpeace activists anchored floating islands 20 km northwest of Borkum as a protest camp. "In view of the accelerating climate crisis, we can no longer afford any more gas drilling. Unique habitats in the Wadden Sea that are worth protecting are also at stake here," said Mira Jäger from Greenpeace, explaining the protest. A Dutch court issued a temporary injunction against the protest action and Greenpeace disbanded the camp at the beginning of this month.

"We reviewed our decision in light of legal requirements on climate protection and the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court in this regard," explained LBEG President Carsten Mühlenmeier. For this reason, the office has limited the approval of the framework operating plan and the grant to 18 years. It was also stipulated that funding would end prematurely as soon as natural gas was no longer required as an energy source due to the targeted heat transition in Germany. "However, as long as natural gas is still consumed in Germany, the following applies: natural gas extracted from domestic deposits is considerably less harmful to the climate than imported gas," explained Mühlenmeier.

(anw)