Jesse Frederik, a smart Dutch journalist, has argued that locals greatly exaggerated the harmfulness of the earthquakes.1 But even if they hadn’t, there was a good case to keep drilling. The remaining reserves, some 500 billion cubic metres, are worth around €200 billion at current wholesale prices – enough to pay every single resident of the province €150,000 as compensation and still have 110 billion euros.

Except the Dutch government already showed that they are not going to pay out those compensations. There are already thousands of homes in northeastern Netherlands with gas-related cracks in the walls that would need expensive construction to fix, and AFAIK the affected residents never got that money.

Destroying the wells does not change the likelihood of additional earthquakes

Blatant lie. The whole premise of the article is that the author wants gas extraction to continue, and removing more gas is obviously going to make the ground shift more.

The demand for data centres has suddenly increased the usefulness of baseload power.

Of course they don't see an issue with absurd power requirements for LLMs and facial recognition tech.