Our friends in the Netherlands are in the midst of a battle with Shell Oil to stop a CO2 project under their densely populated city - whenever a government and/or company want to do something that impacts the environment, the people living there should have a say.... they oppose it. We hope Shell respects the wishes of the people who live there - Barendrecht is their HOME.
A carbon capture and storage facility that is planned in the Netherlands faces harsh criticism and active protesting.
A plan by oil giant Shell to store 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in a depleted gas reservoir beneath the Dutch city of Barendrecht has drawn the ire of residents and local officials who have vowed to thwart it.
"We are going to do everything to oppose this project," declared Barendrecht deputy mayor Simon Zuurbier, who voiced fears for the safety of the city's 50,000 inhabitants.
"We are taking legal action to get it cancelled and we'll approve none of the required permits."
Read the full article here
Showing posts with label community opposition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community opposition. Show all posts
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Monday, September 21, 2009
Geological Sequestration Projects Hitting Public Opposition Wall
Last year, Swedish Company Vattenfall announced its plans to go on-line with a major pilot program to test carbon capture and sequestration at a coal-fired power plant. The company recently acknowledged that permitting snags fueled by local opposition render it unable to commence geologic sequestration of captured CO2. Vattenfall intended to begin capturing CO2 at its 30-megawatt Schwarze Pumpe facility, located in Spremberg, Germany, and sequestering it in the nearby Altmark depleted gas field by March or April 2009. Residents of the host-city, however, have expressed concerns about the safety of geological sequestration, preventing the final permitting approval for the site and creating questions about when - or if - the site could be available for any CCS operations.
Vattenfall’s experience at this project is not an isolated incident. Vattenfall reported delays in obtaining approvals for one of its Danish storage projects pointing, in part, to public opposition by local stakeholders. In June, German news sources reported that activists were protesting plans by electric utility RWE to transport captured CO2 by pipeline from a powerplant near Cologne to a sequestration site on Germany’s North Sea Coast. The Wall Street Journal also reported in April that Royal Dutch Shell had run into challenges siting a sequestration facility in Barendrecht, Netherlands, due to grass roots opposition from local residents.
Public opposition is likely to be a critical strategic and legal consideration for US projects. On Friday, August 21, Battelle, the lead partner in a Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership project announced that it was abandoning plans to participate in a $92 million public-private demonstration project to site a geological sequestration project in Western Ohio. While the partner cited only “business reasons” for its decision, the reported public opposition to the project could not have helped.
These setbacks illustrate the significant challenges that the siting and permit-approval process can pose, particularly in the face of public opposition, to an otherwise promising project. This will be particularly true during the early stages of a CCS deployment. US policymakers and investors would do well to watch and learn from these early case studies, and to ensure that they devote the legal, political and community relations resources needed to ensure that proposed projects move forward in a realistic and timely fashion.
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