There is ‘significant potential’ to discover large quantities of gas on Dutch territory, particularly in unconventional sources such as shale, coal beds and shallow fields, the oil and gas industry body EBN said in a new report on Tuesday.

The report Focus on Dutch Gas looks at the current state of gas production in the Netherlands and its future potential.
‘Shallow gas has always been avoided because of the drilling risks and is only rarely taken into production,’ EBN chairman Jan Dirk Bokhoven told the Financieele Dagblad. ‘But last year that happened for the first time.’
Bokhoven said that if all the untapped sources of gas are combined, the total could amount to 500,000 cubic metres. ‘That is a very rough estimate, but some of that can be extracted,’ he told the paper.
The biggest Dutch gas field was found in Slochteren in the northern province of Groningen in 1959 and established the Netherlands as a major gas exporting country.