Groningen’s gold: the gas field that gripped Europe

Posted: April 21, 2026

When explorers initially stumbled across one of the world’s largest natural gas fields, they were less than thrilled. It was the early 1950s and the wells they were drilling across the northern Netherlands were meant to find something else: oil.

Crude was much more valuable than gas, and so the geologists and engineers moved on, probing the region’s subterranean rock formations for years. By the summer of 1959, yet another American drilling crew, working for a joint venture between Shell and ExxonMobil, was setting up on a beet farm west of Groningen, the largest city in the region.

One early July morning, some 8,700 feet below the surface, their drill once again struck gas. The glow from the flame atop their derrick was reportedly visible all the way from the city, 10 miles away.

Soon after, the oil companies finally realized what they had found: rather than isolated deposits, they had inadvertently kept tapping the same super-giant gas field, covering an area of almost 350 square miles. The volume of the Groningen gas field, as it came to be known, reached around 100 trillion cubic feet. To this day, it remains the largest gas deposit in Europe outside of Russia.

Over the next half-century, Groningen would not only supply much of the continent’s natural gas, but also pioneer key exploration techniques—and spark a boom in oil and gas exploration across Europe.

How the Groningen gas field opened up North Sea oil and gas exploration

Dutch households had long relied mostly on coal and oil to heat and cook. Now pipelines were laid across the country and, within a decade, three-quarters of the population was using gas. Even the country’s countless glasshouses made the switch, ditching the more expensive ‘town gas’ made from coal. Dutch natural gas was also exported to Germany, Belgium and France.

Production from Groningen kept rising exponentially throughout the 1960s and 70s. (Later, smaller fields were discovered and Groningen was mainly used to prop up supplies whenever demand was particularly high.) While the gas was extracted by the oil companies, the government owned 40% stake in the venture, and the revenue helped finance the country’s welfare state and even the vast flood walls it built against the North Sea. Shell estimates that, between 1963 and 2020, Groningen gas generated some €429bn in earnings, corrected for inflation, most of which went to the state.

To the oil and gas industry, however, the field’s real significance lay in what it meant for other discoveries—and how they were exploited.  

Until Groningen, the North Sea had been largely written off as a meaningful source of oil or gas. Now geologists started mapping what was little more than a blank spot on the map, and countries rushed to divide up the ocean into national areas for exploration (the Dutch, amply supplied as they now were, didn’t bother to drill their first offshore well until 1968). Within ten years of Groningen’s discovery, a new gold rush had opened up the entire region to oil and gas extraction.

The exploration techniques used at Groningen itself were pioneering, too. Given the field’s vast size, the developers set up clusters of closely spaced wells, including some of the first extended reach wells, which stretched out farther horizontally than vertically. Each cluster had a single treatment plant and control center, which kept down costs.

Once the deposit had been significantly depleted, Shell and Exxon used powerful compressors to compensate for its declining pressure and keep production flowing. Groningen was also host to advances in seismic imaging, to allow for better mapping of the underground geology.   

In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of Groningen’s development, then-Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson praised it as one of the greatest energy discoveries in history, singling out the expertise that was generated there.

“Since the first days of its discovery a half century ago, the Groningen field has been an extraordinary proving ground for the technical skill, innovative ideas and inspiring vision that have helped shape the energy industry as we know it today,” Tillerson said.

The rise and fall of the Groningen gas field

By then, Groningen was still supplying more than half of the Netherlands’ production, and Exxon was confident its enormous resources would keep it productive for at least another 50 years.

But the exploration was having unintended consequences: the change in pressure had led to decades of compaction in the reservoir’s sandstone, causing subsidence and, starting in the 1990s, more than 1,000 earthquakes that caused damage to buildings and infrastructure across the region.

In 2012, a 3.6-magnitude quake—the most forceful to date—sparked a rise in research into the field, and the government began to limit extraction volumes. Despite a compensation scheme for earthquake damage, public sentiment started turning against Groningen.

Following more production cuts, the Dutch Senate finally passed a law to permanently shut the field in 2024. (In response, Shell and Exxon have initiated arbitration against the Netherlands, seeking compensation for billions in damages due to the closure.)

A few years on, political parties and some industry experts are now advocating for some of the wells to be reopened. They argue that, at the very least, the field should act as an emergency reserve to meet Dutch gas demand during an energy crisis.

Whether or not Groningen’s gas will ever flow again, one thing is certain: its accidental discovery more than a half-century ago irrevocably changed the European energy landscape.