A decade after the Spanish Government decided to close the Castor project, the structure of the marine platform continues to break the horizon from the coast of Sénia.
Pending since before the pandemic, the Spanish Government and Enagás have not yet begun the definitive sealing of the wells prior to future dismantling.
Since its closure, the maintenance of the facilities has cost close to 100 million euros. Meanwhile, farmers have returned to planting on the land through which the buried gas pipeline that was to connect the underwater gas storage runs.
The Citizens' Platform in Defense of the Sénia Lands and the Alcanar City Council are still fighting to have the easements revoked.
On September 26, 2013, exactly ten years ago, the Ministry of Industry ordered the concessionaire company Escal UGS to paralyze any gas injection activity at the Castor facilities after causing, two days before, a 3.6-degree earthquake. on the Richter scale.
It was the beginning of the end of the questioned underwater gas store, which still triggered tremors of up to 4.2 degrees five days later. It only came into operation in the testing phase, injecting 115 of the 1,900 million cubic meters of gas planned.
Since then, controversy has continued to accompany the closure process and the various political, administrative and judicial decisions that have been made in this regard. The first and most famous, a royal decree from the then PP Government compensating Florentino Pérez's ACS group with 1,350 million euros, after renouncing the concession. The subsequent judicial rulings of the Constitutional and the Supreme Court annulled the payment mechanism charged to the gas bill, which the State has ended up assuming mainly through public debt.
Last week, several media outlets reported on the ruling of the National Court that forces ACS to return 210 million euros of the financial remuneration derived from the compensation mechanism of this decree.
Decisions on the environmental and technical responsibilities of the fiasco have also brought a tail. Beyond the fact that the Minister of Industry of the PP, Álvaro Nadal, openly recognized in Congress that a "design error" was at the origin of the problems, the Castellón Court ended up exonerating for crime against the environment and prevarication environmental protection two leaders of the concessionaire company, which entered bankruptcy in 2019. The same year, the Spanish government announced that it would permanently close and dismantle the facilities.
Ten years after the seismic episode and the provisional closure, the farmers who own the land through which the project's gas pipelines run are still subject to the limitations imposed by the easements for their passage: a strip of a few meters in the 20-kilometer length between the network general transportation and the coast with crop limitations. It is one of the pending accounts in the territory, along with the return of public resources and the definitive dismantling of the facilities, according to the Sénia Platform.
"We want the easements to disappear," remarked the entity's spokesperson, Evelio Monfort.
A quick visit to the land route of the gas pipeline reveals that, after ten years, many of the affected farmers no longer pay attention to the easement. Touching the cairns that mark the surface of the buried pipeline, you can see planted mandarin and orange trees. "It is clear that they have not paid much attention. People do not care about having the easement because they are using it. But we do not have to have it for something that will never work," he stressed.
The Alcanar City Council also joins this claim. "Once we know that the Castor is a failed project and that the pipeline has no use, it is necessary to revert the peasants' easements and recover their harvest, not only on the pipeline, but on the perimeter to the right and left," the mayor, Joan Roig, has assured. Although the route runs along the boundary of the municipality on the Vinaròs side, a large part of the owners are from the municipality.
In fact, the administrative and judicial decisions that buried the project once again reveal the inconsistency with the reality on the ground. The most egregious case is that of the nearly twelve-kilometer stretch of gas pipeline that connects the gas pipeline and the onshore plant: it was annulled by a ruling confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2015 that condemned the State for having authorized its construction, fragmenting the project and saving money. the mandatory environmental impact declaration. As it is, with no current or planned use, pipes - and easements - remain motionless.
A decade after the seismic episode, the folder for the definitive dismantling of the facilities also remains inexplicably open and without clear forecast. Monfort recalls the financial burden of the hibernation entrusted to Enagás and which has cost around 96 million euros up to that point.
"We have everything dead here, waiting to see what happens, that prices change, that it becomes a little more expensive, that we continue paying Enagás for maintenance, that we have a danger that we have at sea," summarizes Monfort.
When the useful life of the provisional seals of the underwater wells installed in 2016 had long expired and had to be renewed, the Spanish PSOE Government announced that they would be permanently closed as a prior step to their dismantling.
After three years of processing, and with the green light from the environmental impact study since last March, the work still does not have a specific date. Even less the withdrawal of the platform.
Although parliamentary initiatives demanding these actions appear sporadically, the anguish that was experienced in the streets during those days of seismic movements at the end of September and beginning of October is now far away. After the exculpatory ruling of the Court of Castellón, the association of affected people Aplaca decided not to appeal through civil means and ended up dissolving.
"Although the battery of demands has been extinguished little by little and now, in the media, the case does not have the space it deserves, the City Council, hand in hand with the Platform, continue to make the relevant demands," says the mayor.
"Let's follow up with the Ministry by asking for a calendar, which we have not yet achieved, so that they can tell us when and how the dismantling will be done, also to know what repercussions it may have: that they do a study of seismic danger and what consequences it may have. for the maritime ecosystem," defends Roig.
From the Platform, Monfort trusts that, sooner or later, this dismantling will end up taking place and, he assures, it will be "a victory for the people of Sénia, who at the time complained and said 'enough is enough, we don't want this' ". "This is our victory: that it be recognized that with what we said at the time we and the people who supported us were right," he concluded.
