Huge amounts of gas are stored in north-west Germany, trapped in slate rock, which could be extracted using the fracking method. There are also untapped deposits in the North Sea. Would that solve the energy crisis?
More than two decades ago, the USA’s own thirst for energy, the consequences of the Gulf wars, a lot of space and considerable reserves meant that what was then a new, costly method of extracting gas suddenly became a talking point.
It’s fracking, which involves squeezing gas trapped in hard shale rock out of the ground. To do this, a chemical cocktail is pressed into the rock, cracks appear through which the gas flows out and can be captured.
There are hundreds of thousands of wells dedicated to fracking in the United States. In view of high energy prices, the method, which was initially too expensive, is now highly profitable and the USA exports the gas it produces to Europe.
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Does it have to be that way? Isn’t that also possible in this country? What about the domestic sources of fossil energy, which has suddenly become so scarce and is still urgently needed because there is still far from enough sustainably generated energy available?
There are large amounts of slate rock, especially in north-west Germany. It theoretically contains enough natural gas to cover up to 20 percent of Germany’s needs. According to the BVEG, half of which can really be used economically.
For this reason, there were already plans more than ten years ago to promote gas in Germany in this way. But the resistance was great. Critics worried about drinking water. In order for the mixture of sand and water required for fracking to have the desired effect, chemicals have to be added.
At the end, the brew flows back up through the boreholes. In the process, substances present in the rock are also dissolved out, all of which are not very compatible: arsenic, bromine, radioactive strontium.
In the USA, where the boreholes are often found in deserts, that doesn’t matter much. In densely populated Germany, it quickly becomes a problem, which is why the method was banned in Germany in 2017 after violent public protests.
In addition to environmental pollution, there is another issue: the gas deposits are of manageable size, the gas fields are quickly exhausted, and the next deposit has to be drilled. This is less of a problem in unpopulated areas, but becomes an issue in densely populated Germany.
Here, too, the BVEG association refers to opportunities for improvement. You could drill several kilometers to the side from one well site, produce hundreds of fracks from one point and keep the surface area requirements tolerable.
However, as the association explained in a contribution for the ARD, precise information for each development area is only possible if test drillings have been made there and the situation examined. This results in what is probably the biggest problem: the effort that would have to be made in Germany is enormous.
Even if the decision were made to allow fracking again, and if resistance to it died down, it would be a long time before the first gas could flow. The experts reckon with three years. Relevant production volumes would only be expected in ten years. That’s how long it takes for an entire industry to be rebuilt, for drilling rigs to be erected and for fracking chemistry to be further developed.
However, since natural gas should be a bridging technology that will only be used until the energy transition to sun and wind has progressed and natural gas can be replaced by hydrogen, the effort and follow-up costs are disproportionately high.
When it comes to domestic energy reserves, it is more profitable to expand natural gas production in the North Sea. Something also happened here in April: The planned natural gas production off the island of Borkum has come a little closer.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs in Hanover and the Dutch company One-Dyas have agreed on the key points of the project. “In the North Sea, 20 kilometers from Borkum, there is obviously the largest natural gas field for 25 years that the Netherlands wants to develop there with an assumed total volume of around 60 billion cubic meters,” says Lower Saxony’s Economics Minister Bernd Althusmann.
The field is located in the German-Dutch border area, very close to the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park. It is to be developed from a production platform that is visible from Borkum via horizontal drilling that protects the national park. If everything is approved, five billion cubic meters of gas could flow per year from 2024 – about as much as Germany has been producing per year so far.
For comparison: The demand in Germany is currently 90 billion cubic meters per year. In this respect, it is a piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the overall issue of energy supply security. The minister believes that the decision to produce natural gas must be reassessed against the background of the new geostrategic situation.
His colleague, Environment Minister Olaf Lies, adds: “We actually need more gas from the Netherlands. Then it becomes difficult when we say on the one hand: ‘Dear Dutch people, please supply us with more gas’ and on the other hand say ‘Dear Dutch people, please don’t promote that in the North Sea’, just because it’s a demarcation to German sovereign territory. That made us say: Let’s talk to each other.”
Just 20 years ago, around a fifth of the gas consumed in Germany came from domestic production. In the meantime, the self-sufficiency rate is five percent, and the trend is declining because the developed deposits are coming to an end. Domestic oil production covers two percent of consumption. New gas fields were no longer looked for, after all, people wanted to get away from gas and importing cheap gas from Russia was enough.
This was also confirmed by a spokesman for the State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology in Hanover in an interview with Deutschlandfunk. “At the moment the sea is calm,” he says. Turning the entire energy industry upside down within a few weeks, that doesn’t work. Especially since larger new deposits would probably not be found on land, but most likely under the North Sea.
But should Germany now look there itself? State Environment Minister Olaf Lies is skeptical: “If you think of completely new fields that need to be developed, then you are also talking about relatively long periods of time. And the goal for Lower Saxony, as it says in the law, is that by 2040 the entire energy supply will be converted to renewables. So it will make little sense to start funding in eight or ten years that can then only be maintained for eight or ten years.”
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These pragmatic objections should also make Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) think. He wants to produce natural gas and oil in the North Sea. He told the debate magazine “The European” that he considered “the stipulation in the coalition agreement that we no longer want to produce oil and gas in the North Sea and do not want to explore new fields” to be out of date.”
The boss of the energy supplier Eon from Essen, Leonhard Birnbaum, argues in the same direction: “We have to ask ourselves the question: Can we develop additional fields in Germany?” He told the “Wirtschaftswoche” and added: “We now have to without taboos search for any solutions that will help us to improve our situation. A modest increase in domestic production would not be the solution, but it would be a small building block that can also help.”
The article “Germany’s gigantic gas supply and why it is so difficult for us to tap into it” comes from WirtschaftsKurier.
