Demonstrators clash with police in the northern Dutch village of Loppersum, January 2014. Villagers were protesting against continuing gas production; they blamed extraction for causing earthquakes | Catrinus Van Der Veen/AFP via Getty Images New Dutch disease — a gas hangover The Netherlands blew through billions in profits from natural gas, and now it’s turning to Russia for supplies.

AMSTERDAM — The Netherlands partied for years on gas from the Groningen gas field. Suddenly the barman is calling time much earlier than expected.

Whatever government emerges from elections in March, it will inherit an energy system in which 98 percent of homes rely for cooking and heating on gas. This vast infrastructure was built for a resource that is in increasingly short supply.

The giant gas fields of the northeastern Dutch province of Groningen are estimated to be 80 percent exhausted. Repeated earthquakes caused by extraction have cracked walls, damaged tens of thousands of houses and forced the government to begin prematurely winding down a resource that for decades helped boost Dutch living standards.

The country was slow to cultivate alternatives while the going was good.

"We weren't that interested,” said Jan Vos of the center-left Labor Party (PvdA), which governs in coalition with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. “We were a fossil fuel country."

The Netherlands became accustomed to the revenues generated by Groningen gas and by Royal Dutch Shell. "The whole political system was geared toward maintaining those interests," Vos added.

There is an irony of sorts in that much of the country, including Groningen, lies close to or below sea level, making it one of the most vulnerable regions of the world to the risk of rising seas allegedly caused by fossil fuel-driven climate change. Alternatives are now being sought. The outgoing government committed to hoisting the percentage of its energy consumption that comes from renewables to 14 percent in 2020 from just 5.5 percent in 2014 — one of the lowest levels in the EU.

A number of offshore wind farms are planned. But the transition will take time, and energy plans have not survived government changeovers in the past, according to Louise van Schaik of the policy think tank Clingendael. The anti-Islam Freedom Party, run by the firebrand politician Geert Wilders, is leading in polls. It does not mention energy in its one-page election program, except to vow to stop public money for windmills.

“A lot has been set in motion, but it is not guaranteed that it will happen,” Van Schaik said.

Earthquakes

Nowhere is the scale of the challenge more clear than Groningen, where the countryside is littered with houses supported by struts or marked for demolition due to damage from tremors linked to gas extraction.

About 152,000 homes need to be reinforced, according to a study commissioned by Groningen province, an undertaking that may cost many billions and years of toil. The scale has led some to question whether it might be better for the state to simply offer cash to enable people to abandon the already depopulating area, rather than being trapped in unsellable and unsafe homes.

“It’s a slow onset disaster,” said Thomas Kokshoorn, a planning adviser at the Groningen provincial government. “If you own a house in the area and you want to move away, you are locked in place. There is already population decline, and with the earthquakes it’s becoming even harder. We need to see deaths before people will wake up.”

In a sign of local ire, a group of farmers is suing NAM — the joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil that extracts the gas — demanding more for damages to their property than the company is willing to offer. So far, €1.2 billion has been set aside for claims up to 2018, with the Dutch state on the hook for 64 percent of the costs.

Groningers could be forgiven for questioning where the wealth created from the field has gone now that they need it. Between 1960 and 2013, the Netherlands took in approximately €265 billion in gas revenues. But the Dutch can only look across the North Sea to Norway's $874 billion petroleum-funded sovereign wealth fund with envy. If Dutch gas revenues had received the same treatment, a Dutch fund could have been worth almost €350 billion in 2014, according to a Court of Audit study.

Instead, for decades, it was largely used to supplement the government’s current account. After production was limited in 2015 in response to the earthquakes, public finances quickly took a hit.

As Moscow's relations with the West descended into acrimony over hacking allegations and its role in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, its gas exports to Europe kept steadily flowing.

“They had a party with gas for the last forty years,” said Thierry Bros, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “They had gas of their own and they were making quite a lot of money selling it. They had no plan B.”

Russian gas

One country in particular is poised to step in to fill in the gap in supply: Russia.

In 2016, as Moscow's relations with the West descended into acrimony over hacking allegations and its role in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, its gas exports to Europe kept steadily flowing.

“We set new records in terms of gas deliveries to Europe,” Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller announced last month in his 2016 roundup, adding that supplies hit 614.5 million cubic meters per day. “That amount is unprecedented for the Soviet Union and modern Russia alike.”

Two weeks earlier, Miller had warned that Europe's gas supply could be cut off over a dispute with Ukraine.

Europe is split on whether to consider this a problem. For countries nearer to Russia that see it as a threat, increasing reliance on its gas imports is anathema. Others, such as Germany, see the buying of gas in "merely commercial terms," according to Marco Giuli of the European Policy Centre.

With supplies from Norway and Britain also on the wane, and liquefied natural gas less competitive, the Netherlands falls into the latter camp.

“Even during the Cold War, we imported from Russia,” said Vos, the PvdA lawmaker. “It’s an issue for countries in the east of Europe, like Ukraine or Romania, but not for the Netherlands.”