Once upon a time — and not very long ago — certain corporate and government voices insisted that earthquakes in places without natural fault lines simply couldn’t happen. The Netherlands was solid. Groningen was safe. The ground beneath families, schools, and lives was reliable. Except it turns out none of that was true — because some earthquakes can be manufactured, engineered, or to put it bluntly, provoked.

And the culprit was not tectonics.

It was extraction.

Extraction at scale.

Extraction for profit.

And no one extracted more from Groningen than Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, joint operators of the Groningen gas field — Europe’s largest, and possibly the most politically convenient geological time bomb in modern Europe.

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“They said earthquakes couldn’t happen here.”

That line does not come from satire.

It is the title of a sober, analytical piece reviewing the consequences of extraction-induced seismicity:

“They said earthquakes couldn’t happen here.”

For decades, Dutch citizens were told that any shaking, any cracks, any noise in the night was ignition, creaking wood, stress, imagination — anything except the direct result of gas extraction causing subsidence in the Earth’s crust.

Then the earthquakes kept coming.

Then the damage kept spreading.

Then the denials began to look less like caution and more like PR theatre.

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A Community Shaken — Literally

A recent study in Groningen showed that children raised in the earthquake zone — a zone created not by God but by Shell’s drilling strategy — have:

Higher school absence rates and elevated symptoms of depression and instability.

In other words:

Shell shook the ground.

The ground shook the houses.

The houses shook the children.

The children carry the tremor now.

This was not:

• A natural disaster

• A surprise

• A geological accident

This was:

• Predicted

• Measured

• Modelled

• And ignored because the gas was more valuable than the people who lived on top of it.

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The Economics of Earthquake Denial

To understand this, look not at geology but at money.

Shell is one of the ultimate sin stocks — a company investors buy when ethics are optional and dividends are divine. Its largest institutional shareholders include BlackRock, Vanguard, and Norges Bank Investment Management — all of whom enjoy reliable quarterly distributions of fossil-fuel wealth, regardless of where the rigs are, what burns, who coughs, or what trembles.

Seismic stability vs. shareholder yield?

Shell made its choice.

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The Pattern

Shell has a rich historical appetite for:

• Extract now

• Deny harm

• Avoid liability

• Externalize cleanup

• Leave quietly

We have seen it in:

• The Niger Delta

• The North Sea

• The Arctic exploration fiasco

• The Ogoniland contamination

• And now, suburban Dutch living rooms where children’s drawings fall off the walls because the ground moves.

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Shell Will Say: “We Followed Regulatory Guidance.”

And that may be legally accurate.

Because Shell is very skilled at helping write the regulations.

Regulations can be rewritten.

Earthquakes cannot.

References

• https://indiandefencereview.com/they-said-earthquakes-couldnt-happen-here/

• https://nltimes.nl/2025/11/05/earthquake-damage-linked-school-absence-mental-health-issues-groningen-teens

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