In 1959, the Dutch Petroleum Company arrived for an exploratory well in Kolham, Groningen. The exploratory drilling was a success, but it was several years before it became clear just how great that success was. The drilling had major consequences, for Groningen, for the northern Netherlands, actually for all of Europe.
The drilling was the first in which the Slochteren natural gas bubble was tapped: the Groningen field. This natural gas bubble contained 2,740 billion cubic meters of natural gas, making the field the largest in Europe. The find put the northern Netherlands firmly on the map as an energy region, with northerners able to build on a longer history of peat, petroleum and smaller gas fields.
Northern Netherlands as an energy region.
Natural gas was a location-based resource; it was simply in the Groningen soil. This gave the northern Netherlands a starting position to grow into the center of the Dutch gas economy. But the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end, and due to the eventful history of earthquakes, the Groningen field will be closed in October 2023. The raw materials of the future, such as wind, solar and energy carriers like hydrogen, are no longer location bound. Yet this by no means means means the end of the North as an energy region. Between natural gas and hydrogen, the Northern Netherlands has not sat idle, but has established a unique infrastructure and developed into a key region for the imminent energy transition.
Peat bogs and peat extraction.
The northern Dutch landscape was traditionally characterized by large areas of wet, saturated and spongy soil: so-called peat bogs. That this description bears little resemblance to the northern Dutch landscape of today is no coincidence. The northerners took their landscape in hand considerably. After all, wet peat soil was not usable for agriculture, but could be made useful in other ways. 'Staking' the peat out of the soil and drying it created peat, a pre-modern fuel. The first descriptions of the use of peat in the northern Netherlands date back to Roman times. This early peat production was basically for personal use, but as early as the Middle Ages this began to change.
From the thirteenth century, a more systematic extraction of peat took place on the eastern side of the Hunze River. People began to settle in the peat and the number of monasteries in the province of Groningen expanded greatly; some of them became actively involved in peat extraction. The proximity of the (trading) city of Groningen and the easily navigable river Hunze, which functioned as a natural supply and drainage route, provided an excellent context for extraction.
However, medieval peat extraction was still small-scale compared to the commercial peat extraction that took off in the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Dutch population grew and so did the economy. Wood became scarcer and especially from (Dutch) cities there was a strongly increasing demand for other fuels, such as peat. With the growing peat production, pretty soon there were no peat bogs left in Holland. Since the northern Netherlands had an enormous area that lent itself to peat extraction, many initiatives for large-scale reclamation came from within the region as well as from outside. In the process, a new form of organization also came into vogue, which became characteristic of the Drenthe peat economy in particular: the peat company. These were partnerships whose participants, so-called compagnons, contributed money and thus jointly set up enterprises.
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