More gas trapped under Dutch soil

There are huge reserves of gas hidden under Dutch territory that could be exploited with new technologies, a new report says.

The report, Focus on Dutch Gas 2009, was published by Energie Beheer Nederland, the energy management agency that coordinates the oil and gas extraction for the Dutch government.

For the first time, the organisation made an inventory of the so-called unconventional gas potential in the Netherlands, both onshore and offshore. These can be wells of gas trapped inside coals or shale that can not be recovered with traditional techniques.

The Dutch soil has an estimated 500,000 billion cubic metres of unconventional gas hidden, according to EBN. That is 160 times the amount that was originally in the Groningen field - the natural gas reserve that earned the Dutch treasury enormous revenue in the past fifty years. In 2008, Dutch gas production was about 80 billion cubic metres.

The EBN studie was done at the request of politicians who have expressed concern about Dutch gas reserves getting exhausted, which could lead to a stronger dependency on Russia, the largest owner of natural gas resources in the world.

Berend Scheffers of EBN says he thinks only about 0.1 to 1 percent of the unconventional gas underneath the Netherlands can be recovered. The American company Chevron has been extracting unconventional gas from the North Sea since last year, he said. "Nobody was interested before."