Those responsible for the company Escal, awarded the development of the largest underground gas warehouse to be implemented in Spain, will sit on the bench as of this Monday, accused of a crime against the environment and natural resources with risk to the life and physical integrity of people and with a serious irreversible or catastrophic risk. For this reason, the Prosecutor’s Office asks for each of the two defendants six years in prison as well as the sentence to the company so that it can never again carry out activities in the subsoil and in the gas system.
Nearly 200 witnesses and a quarantine of experts are expected to pass through the Provincial Court of Castellón, who will relate how the beginning of the development of the project ended up causing about a thousand seismic movements with the consequent environmental and material damage. According to the prosecutor’s indictment, the defendants acted “with absolute lightness and totally irresponsible” since they were aware of the consequences that the injection of gas into the tank could have.
The Castor project was an administrative concession granted in 2008 for the exploitation of an underground gas warehouse taking advantage of a geological structure of an old oil field in Amposta, more than 1,700 meters deep and at a distance of 22 kilometers from the Castellón coast of Vinaròs . The idea was to store up to 1.9 billion cubic meters of natural gas, enough to supply the equivalent of 50 days of consumption for all of Spain, according to an estimate. For storage, the project required gas to be injected into the tank.
During the processing of the Environmental Impact Statement, the Ebro Observatory already warned of the risk of earthquakes and recommended the implementation of a seismic monitoring network. But, according to the prosecutor, “with the knowledge of all the defendants of the risks inherent in the planned operations and without the company having the appropriate regulatory compliance program for injection operations,” the gas injection was started. Storage began on June 13 and was stopped on September 17, 2013.
According to data from the Ebro Observatory, there were 285 earthquakes until the day the gas injections stopped, while once the activities ceased and until November of that year there is a record of another 733. The largest of them was one magnitude 4.1. As stated by the prosecutor in his indictment “the potential risk of earthquakes with tragic and dire consequences for people, property and the environment becomes unquestionable.”
The earthquakes also caused dozens of damage to homes, which is why more than thirty owners of homes and premises who suffered damage from the seismic movements are claiming compensation.
However, the consequences of the Castor project were not only physical. The stoppage of the project led to the execution of the fine print of the concession contract, in which compensation was set in the event that the warehouse did not operate. The Escal concessionaire (controlled 66.7% by ACS) and whose managers sit on the bench on Monday, charged 1.35 billion euros for the investments made. The payment was made through Enagás Transporte, the technical manager of the gas system, which would take over the installation and its maintenance and pass the compensation money on to consumers’ gas receipts for the next 30 years. Actually, the money was advanced by the banks Santander, Caixabank and Bankia, which signed an agreement with Enagás to acquire the collection rights of these receipts up to the amount of 1,350 million. The payment formula, devised by the then Government of the PP, was annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2017 since it was approved through a royal decree law, a system that only allows when there are emergency situations and the 35 days for Escal collected compensation were not.
However, a subsequent 2020 Supreme Court ruling forced the state to pay 1.35 billion euros after the payment was left up in the air after being declared unconstitutional. In December of that same year, the Official State Gazette published an authorization of indebtedness to the Treasury for a value of 638 million euros to meet the disbursement.
Despite the fact that five ministers and two senior officials, in addition to two businessmen, including the president of ACS, Florentino Pérez, faced a complaint for embezzlement, prevarication and fraud against the Public Administration, the National Court filed the complaint twice .