BORKUM/HANOVER (dpa-AFX) - The Dutch-British consortium considering the controversial extraction of natural gas off the North Sea island of Borkum is saying goodbye to part of the land it applied for. According to the State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology (LBEG) in Lower Saxony, which is responsible for approval and supervision, the companies One-Dyas and Hansa Hydrocarbons returned a so-called permit field covering more than 880 square kilometers. They had examined whether gas production in the offshore area a good 70 kilometers northwest of the East Frisian islands would be worthwhile.
According to their assessment, this is apparently not the case after the "exploration" of gas or oil. "The companies cited a lack of hydrocarbon potential within this area as the reason," LBEG said in Hanover on Thursday. The application for restitution had already been filed in October, it said, and has since become effective.
In two other subfields, which lie closer to the islands and the coast, the search for the raw materials is still allowed in principle. The total area of these more southerly fields is larger than that of the returned third field. However, the permission for "prospecting" does not include the start of concrete drilling
- for this still several further steps would have to be gone through.
Only on Tuesday the technical authority had communicated that a dozen objections were received approximately from environmentalists against the promotion project. These would be examined in the context of the planning approval procedure.
One-Dyas and its partners plan to produce natural gas from a field between Schiermonnikoog (Netherlands) and Borkum from the end of 2024. The area is close to the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park. Drilling is to take place in both Dutch and German territorial waters. On the Dutch side, the authorities had approved production in June - the German procedure is still ongoing.
Several North Sea islands and an alliance around the German environmental organization Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) had announced that they would file a lawsuit against the permit from the Netherlands. They also plan to take action against the drilling in the event of approval on the German side. "We will exhaust all legal steps to stop this project," stressed DUH national director Sascha Müller-Kraenner.
Lower Saxony's former red-black state government had reversed an original decision against natural gas production off Borkum in the summer under the impact of the energy crisis. The coalition agreement of the new red-green cabinet now states that the "protection of the environment, nature, the Wadden Sea and the island" will be of central importance in the planning approval process. Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) had said of the project: "The best thing would be to stop the gas extraction project."/jap/DP/mis
