The dismantling of the Castor will begin next month

TarragonaThe work to seal and remove the Castor, the underwater natural gas tank that the company Escal UGS launched in 2012 off the coast of Vinaròs, will begin in the next three months, according to sources from Enagás, the company in charge of carrying out this work, explained to the newspaper ARA. The first step to unblock this operation, which has been delayed for years, will be the arrival in April of the jack-up, which is the self-elevating 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 last eight months, according to forecasts and if nothing goes wrong, and will cost 76 million euros.

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

The controversial warehouse is 22 kilometres from the coast of Vinaròs and at a depth of about 1,920 metres. It was sealed by order of the Ministry of Industry in September 2013, after the first gas injections, which only lasted 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, which dates back to July 2021, planned that the entire operation would end in December 2022, but it has been completely impossible to meet the schedule because the environmental impact authorization did not arrive until March 2023 and to obtain a permit, the company had to wait until March 2024 to complete the operation. jack-up It is not easy.

During this time, Enagás has been closing agreements with the various companies that will have to participate in the tasks of sealing the deposit and removing it from the coast, as decided by the council of ministers on October 31, 2019. At least during the first five years, keeping the Castor closed cost 8 and . To begin the work, Enagás still needs an administrative authorization from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, but it is confident that it will obtain it soon. The ARA has processed various written questions about the Castor warehouse to the ministry's communication service, some of them in March 2023, but has not yet received a response.

$100,000 a day

The Castor consists of two platforms anchored to the seabed. The larger one houses the facilities necessary to carry out gas treatment, and the smaller one houses the 13 wells. jack-up will arrive by sea and when it is next to this smaller platform it will deploy its three large metal legs to rise and hold itself above the water.

The jack-up The drilling rig will remain fixed, but will be able to access the 13 wells of the gas storage facility thanks to the drilling rig, which can be moved a few metres to drill wherever necessary, according to Jorge Navarro, vice-president of the Association of Spanish Geologists and Geophysicists of Petroleum, who explains to ARA, who points out that this type of operation is common. In fact, "every year in the world 79,000 gas or oil wells are sealed," explains Victor Vilarrassa, researcher at the CSIC. Hire the jack-up The new infrastructure will cost around 20 million euros (it costs around 100,000 dollars a day), and taking 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 passed more than twice that, Enagás sources assure that they are in good condition. Next, the pipes will have to be cleaned well, 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 being able to start recovering the pipes. The operation is repeated until three giant cement plugs are installed and all the pipes are removed. When this whole process is finished, the current Castor platforms will also have to be removed, but for operation we will still have to wait a lot longer, because it is a completely different phase.

"David versus Goliath"

The start of the works has been great news for the residents of Terres de l'Ebre. The mayor of Alcanar, Joan Roig, in statements to ARA, celebrates that "after more than a decade of constant struggle" they have managed to "dismantle the Castor project, one of the biggest threats to the territory". "We were the little David who faced the giant Goliath, and after many difficulties we can say that we have won this battle", celebrates the mayor, who remembers that the terrestrial plant and the pipes that pass through the fields of the peasants of Alcanar still have to be removed.

The spokesman for the Citizen Platform in Defense of the Lands of Sénia, Evelio Monfort, also celebrates that the Castor is finally being removed but cannot help but look back: "In the end we will have spent more than 2,000 million euros, between the compensation and the maintenance of the Castor". "I'm not guilty," he laments. And he concludes: "I don't understand politics, but they might take a look at it."