2023-07-21 06:12:33
Belgian justice on Thursday canceled the permit granted in 2022 to the British group Ineos to build a petrochemical installation in the port of Antwerp, a mega project of more than 3 billion euros disputed both in Belgium and the Netherlands.
In a press release, the administrative jurisdiction, the Permit Litigation Council, explains that the environmental permit granted by the Flemish Region underestimated the risk of nitrogen discharges that a nature reserve located not far from there, on the Dutch side of the border, might suffer.
In this sense, the Council upholds the arguments of the Dutch province of North Brabant which hosts this protected reserve, the Brabantse Wal, in an area of polders dotted with forests and lakes.
“Current nitrogen discharges already exceed the critical level for many protected habitats” in this reserve, at the risk of threatening “their conservation”, indicates the press release. “The Flemish government has not carefully assessed these concerns,” he adds.
The court specifies that the executive of the Flemish Region now has six months to submit a new environmental permit.
But in the immediate future, Ineos Olefins Belgium, the subsidiary of Ineos which carries this ethane cracker project called “Project One”, “no longer has the authorization to build it”.
The construction site, which started last year, was supposed to be completed in 2026.
The industrial installation, presented as unprecedented for Ineos in Europe, should make it possible to transform ethane into ethylene, one of the raw materials used in the production of plastic.
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Ineos promised that it would allow the creation of “450 direct jobs and thousands of indirect jobs”.
However, its promise of a cracker with a “limited carbon footprint” (compared to other existing facilities of the same type) did not convince environmentalists.
Fourteen organizations including ClientEarth, Greenpeace, WWF Belgium, had challenged the permit granted in June 2022, jointly with two Dutch provinces.
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