The dismantling of the Castor will begin next month.

TarragonaWork to seal and remove the Castor, the underwater natural gas reservoir launched in 2012 by the company Escal UGS off the coast of Vinaròs, will begin in the next three months, according to sources at Enagás, the company in charge of carrying out the work, explained to the newspaper ARA. The first step to unblock this operation, which has been delayed for years, will be the arrival of the jack-up, which is the jack-up platform that will be installed next to the Castor and from where the work to seal the wells will be carried out. This task will take eight months, according to estimates and if nothing goes wrong, and will cost 76 million euros.

The work to permanently seal the wells, according to the project presented by Enagás, has become more expensive due to the poor condition of the pipes in some of the 13 wells, a common consequence when this type of infrastructure is abandoned. The entire investment will be assumed by the State, which has owned the warehouse since the cancellation of the project promoted by Florentino Pérez, director of the construction company ACS, which owns 66% of the shares in Escal UGS.

The controversial warehouse is 22 kilometers off the coast of Vinaròs and at a depth of approximately 1,920 meters. It was sealed by order of the Ministry of Industry in September 2013, after the first gas injections, which lasted only fifteen days, caused seismic movements in the area. Although it has been 12 years since that closure, the infrastructure is still in place. The final project to seal and remove the Castor, dating from July 2021, planned for the entire operation to be completed by December 2022, but it has been completely impossible to meet the schedule because the environmental impact authorization did not arrive until March 2023, and in order to obtain a jack-up It's not easy.

During this time, Enagás has been closing agreements with the various companies that will have to participate in the work to seal the reservoir and remove it from the coast, as decided by the Council of Ministers on October 31, 2019. At least for the first five years, keeping the Castor closed cost 8 and 100 million euros. To begin the work, Enagás still needs administrative authorization from the Ministry for Ecological Transition, but is confident it will obtain it soon. ARA has submitted various written questions about the Castor warehouse to the ministry's communications service, some of them in March 2023, but has not yet received a response.

$100,000 per day

The Castor consists of two platforms anchored to the seabed. The larger one houses the facilities needed to process the gas, and the smaller one houses the 13 wells. jack-up It will arrive by sea and when it is next to this smaller platform it will deploy its three large metal legs to rise and stand on the water.

The jack-up The drilling rig will remain stationary, but will be able to access the 13 gas storage wells thanks to the drilling rig, which can be moved a few meters to drill wherever necessary, according to Jorge Navarro, vice president of the Association of Spanish Petroleum Geologists and Geophysicists, who explained to ARA. He emphasized that this type of operation is common. In fact, "every year 79,000 gas or oil wells are sealed worldwide," explains Victor Vilarrasa, a researcher at the CSIC. Hire the jack-up It will cost around €20 million (it costs around $100,000 a day), and transporting it to Vinaròs and returning it could increase the bill by another €10 million.

Once the new infrastructure is installed, it will be necessary to recover the temporary plugs that were installed inside the pipes. The useful life of these plugs, which were installed in April 2016 to contain the gas, is between two and four years. Although they have already served more than double that, Enagás sources assure that they are in good condition. Next, the pipes will have to be thoroughly cleaned, since in some "the presence of tar has been detected," according to previous reports.

Once the pipes are clean, the first cement plug will have to be made before the pipes can be recovered. The operation is repeated until three giant cement plugs have been installed and all the pipes have been removed. When this entire process is complete, the Castor's current platforms will also have to be removed, but the operation will still take much longer, as it's a completely different phase.

"David vs. Goliath"

The start of the work has been great news for the residents of Terres de l'Ebre. The mayor of Alcanar, Joan Roig, speaking to ARA, celebrates that "after more than a decade of constant struggle," they have achieved "the dismantling of the Castor project, one of the greatest threats to the territory." "We were little David facing the giant Goliath, and after many difficulties, we can say we have won this battle," the mayor exclaims, noting that the ground plant and the pipes that run through the fields of the farmers of Alcanar still need to be removed.

The spokesperson for the Citizen Platform in Defense of the Lands of Sénia, Evelio Monfort, also celebrates the final removal of the Castor project, but he can't help but look back: "In the end, we will have spent more than 2 billion euros, between compensation and the maintenance of the Castor project." "I'm not guilty," he laments. And he concludes: "I don't understand politics, but maybe they'll make him look into it."