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Why Amsterdam Is Giving Up on Natural Gas

The city plans to wean its homes off domestic natural gas by 2050, starting now.

New homes in Amsterdam's IJburg, a series of artificial islands where future homes will be warmed by heat pumps. (Zoetnet/Flickr)






This all makes it sound pretty simple, but the issues ahead are still pretty huge. For heat pumps to be cost effective, for example, buildings need to be extremely well insulated, which could be why only around 1,000 Dutch homes are currently fitted with the technology. That’s an easy enough goal to manage for new construction, but it would be far harder to install in the city’s older, often rather drafty housing stock.

Meanwhile, district heating needs to be very carefully regulated. When a single supplier installs and owns the pipe network, they have a monopoly over the area they supply. This issue is currently managed by mandating that district heating costs no more than any provider on the conventional fuel markets. Local government magazine Binnenlands Bestuur still suggests that gas heating of some sort may persist in Amsterdam’s core, where buildings are currently unsuitable for heat pumps and laying pipes in narrow streets could cause major disruption—even if it’s more likely to do so in the form of more biogas than natural gas.

To plan changes like these suggests a high level of commitment to green energy, consistent with the culture of a country whose widespread historic use of wind power and vulnerability to sea level rise makes the greening of infrastructure an easier sell to the public. The reasons for the planned switch are also geopolitical, however. Like the rest of Europe, the Netherlands relies partly on Russian gas imports, up to 50 percent of which need to flow via pipeline through Ukraine. Disagreements between Moscow and Kiev have led to gas supply disruptions in the past, and the Russian government sometimes uses gas diplomacy as a form of leverage with its neighbors.

This doesn’t always work, but the Netherlands and other E.U. states clearly dislike the potential instability of relying on Russian resources. The Dutch are in a better position than most because, as the E.U.’s largest gas producer, they can meet 70 percent of their gas needs domestically. They have problems here too, as gas extraction around the northern city of Groningen has led to over 1,000 earthquakes since 1986, despite the area being nowhere near a fault line. Most of these tremors are tiny, but cracked brickwork and masonry have become a common sight in the area and some buildings have become structurally unsound. It would be hard to give up this source of revenue even if Dutch gas were entirely exported — except that Dutch gas is “low calorie” high nitrogen gas that would provide little competition for Russian gas internationally.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to heat homes with gas when gas extraction is shaking those homes’ foundations. Amsterdam’s plans for a gas-free future aren’t thus evidence of a utopian commitment to cutting emissions. They’re also a pragmatic idea designed to wean the city off of a fuel whose use comes with too many strings attached.

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