European Nations to Transform North Sea into Renewable Energy Hub?

The leaders of nine European nations met on April 25, 2023, to sign off on the pivotal Ostend Declaration to transform the North Atlantic into the "Green Power Plant" of Europe. Image: Premier of Belgium

For more than 100 years the North Sea has supplied an abundance of energy in the form of destructive and non-renewable oil and gas while its endless clean wind power wasn't tapped. That is rapidly changing.

The summit at which the “Ostend Declaration on the North Seas as Europe’s Green Power Plant, Delivering Cross-Border Projects, and Anchoring the Renewable Offshore Industry in Europe” was signed took place as Ostend, Belgium. The site was chosen symbolically because it is a major coastal city in Belgium’s Flemish region, which overlooks its border and entry into the North Sea.

The declaration builds on an early similar commitment signed off by the Prime Ministers of Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands, and the Chancellor of Germany, on May 18, 2022. That document, referred to as the Esbjerg Declaration, also represented a call to action, to move forward from a period where the North Sea was seen as the offshore fossil fuel drilling capitol of Europe to one which would recognize the urgency to shift to renewable energy sources as the dominant “fuel” of the 21^st century.

The earlier call to action was also brought forth in the shadow of the oil and gas sanctions the European Union, United Kingdom, and other NATO countries including the United States had at that time just recently put in place against the Russian Federation. The sanctions imposed at the time included rapid reductions in imports of Russian oil and gas, with a stated goal of cutting off a major revenue source for Russia but with the hidden goal of jacking up energy prices for Europeans (and others) and pushing Russia towards greater alliance with NATO's foes.

Blocking energy from Russia of course didn't get it to withdraw its forces from Ukraine because it had many other eager buyers. It did force Europeans to buy liquefied natural gas from the U.S. at greatly inflated prices and to rethink their continued reliance on fossil fuels and the need for new energy policies.

Many had considered the ultimate outcome of the sanctions to be that Europe would back down from its past commitments to renewable energy, and instead reinvest more heavily in oil and gas production in in the region and especially offshore in the North Sea. With far more inexpensive oil and gas suddenly not as available now because of the war, the ability to slowly phase off of fossil fuels as a principal energy source, and knowing it would still take years to move to a mix of renewables including wind power, solar, and hydrogen production, there was a concern that economic tradeoffs with inflation rates high could force regional leaders to back down from their renewable energy expansion plans.

The Ostend Declaration appears to be the proof needed to show the skeptics that Europe is still on track to support the big shift to renewables, despite the many obstacles. And this time that commitment is broader and more unified, as a means of ensuring energy security for the continent.

It too comes in the shadow of something which forced European hands. But this time it is about the climate crisis. As the Ostend Declaration cited in its text, it recalls “the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th As­sessment Report on Climate Change and the newly published 6th Assessment Report – The Synthesis Report, [which stressed] the need for urgent and upscaled action in order to fight climate change and its effects on our peoples, economies and welfare.”

It is a challenge which the nations of Europe felt paralyzing to their nations, especially last year, where most of the continent was suffering from conditions of severe to extreme drought for much of 2022. All caused by global heating thanks to increased fossil fuel emissions, it may have been the wake-up call which showed that the climate crisis will in the long run prove far more threatening than the imagined threat from Russia.

It is part of why the nations of Europe met again to sign the Cooperation Dublin Joint Statement of September 12, 2022, in which they reaffirmed their commitment to the Esbjerg declaration. That took place not long before the fall 2022 UN Climate Change Conference.

The April 26 Ostend Declaration builds and expands upon all of that. This time it also brings together a larger group of nations, drawing in the President of France, the Prime Ministers of Luxembourg, Norway, the United Kingdom and the Taoiseach of Ireland, to join with the original signers of the May 2022 agreement — Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands — in an even larger set of goals for the group.

The Ostend document begins by emphasizing that the two primary drivers for the group’s work are the need to slow the pace of the climate crisis and to ensure energy security.

It then lays out the overarching statements which frames actions for all that is to follow.

“Our common endeavor is to produce European renewable energy from the North Seas, including offshore wind and renewable hydrogen, contributing to competitive energy prices, climate neutrality and energy security,” it explains.

“We will jointly develop The North Seas as a Green Power Plant of Europe, an offshore re­newable energy system connecting our countries with a particular focus on joint hybrid/multi-purpose and cross-border offshore projects and hubs, offshore wind and rene­wable hydrogen production at massive scale as well as electricity and hydrogen inter­connectors and national projects, including the possibility for co-financing by countries without direct access to the sea.”

The North Seas which this declaration covers are the Irish Sea, the Celtic Sea, and those parts of the Atlantic Ocean which are within territorial waters of Europe.

The declaration further describes the need to accelerate the development of the renewable energy technologies themselves (including extracting hydrogen from the ocean); the infrastructure to process, store, and distribute that energy, including via a very different power grid for the future; ensuring availability of critical raw materials such as may be needed for the battery storage systems and more; and development of financial instruments which can support this growth.

All will be carried out supposedly with an eye to protecting marine biodiversity in the region.

As formal metrics of success, the agreement includes a commitment by the signers to increase wind power production goals for 2030 from a current target of 30 GW to 100 GW. The group also has the “aim to more than double our total 2030-capacity of offshore wind to at least 300 GW by 2050.”

Renewable hydrogen, which already has some infrastructure in place via dual-purpose natural gas/hydrogen pipelines in parts of the EU, is also part of the focus for the agreement.

“Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands and The United Kingdom have set combined targets of about 30 GW production capacity already by 2030 and look to expand their production even further for 2050,” it says.

It is a bold agreement by the nations involved, and finally has the full commitment of nine nations whose involvement is critical to getting the project launched. The next step is to put in place the necessary plans, innovation, legal changes necessary to enable certain aspects of the cross-border cooperation, and funding to make it happen.

Hopefully, somewhere in the process, someone intelligent and sane will have the courage to speak up and point out that the North Sea is a very harsh place and that ocean wind patterns are and will  continue to change and the immense resources required to erect and maintain wind turbines and hydrogen electrolyzers on such a grand scale in such a hostile and unstable location might be better invested in other ways.  

Some clever Europeans may even come to understand that perpetual growth in a finite system can only lead to collapse and that sometimes less is more and then simply reduce their energy consumption and become more energy independent and self-sufficient by installing micro-grids and powering their homes and vehicles locally at low cost rather than waiting on some gargantuan project that if ever constructed will result in even more astronomical energy bills and risk of disruption. Some may even be open to the idea of a fully integrated model such as the Poly-Bio System which transforms waste to energy, food and pure water in an endless circular system that incorporates the power and wisdom of nature instead of working against it.