Sines: Energy for the way ahead

Data assembled by the European Union and released by the environmental watchdog ZERO on May 29 shows that the top ten industrial entities of Portugal emitted nearly nine million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) last year.

For nearly all of this total, the utility of gas fired power plants was held to be mainly responsible. The exception was the Sines Oil Refinery which is owned by Galp Energia and uses a 91MW cogeneration plant to produce electricity and heat through the increasing use of green hydrogen.

Even so, the Sines refinery is way ahead as chief polluter with CO2 emissions totalling 2.2 million tons in 2025 despite having been closed for fifty days to perform maintenance work. This figure is twice that of TAP which holds second place and slightly exceeds the total emissions of the three EDP plants at Lares, Pego and Ribatejo.

Instead of being a resilient source for backing up production from renewables, natural gas is being used in several countries of the EU as the prime component for combined cycle power plants.

In the UK, the independent regulator of energy markets OFGEM reports that nearly all of one hundred pending data centre projects have included in their planning applications the use of natural gas as a second source of power to supplement a main supply from the national grid. Some of these are now planning the construction of their own on-site gas plants to ensure reliability if, as seems increasingly likely, the national grid is unable to cope.

Even with the massive investment made in recent years for solar/wind/hydro renewables there is growing doubt as to the ability of green energy to replace entirely fossil sourced fuels in order to meet current needs. Certainly, the forecasts of ever-increasing demand to serve the burgeoning digital sector make it inevitable that either nuclear SMRs or natural gas or a combination of both must serve for essential resilience.

Eleven data centres have been built in the USA by the cyber behemoths with gas generators as an alternative to the grid. These are estimated to have emitted in year 2025 twice the total of CO2 as Portugal (36 million tons).

More disturbing revelations concerning potential emissions also come from the UK.  Google and its developer entered planning applications to build mammoth data centres on two sites in Essex. The first, on 52 hectares at West Thurrock, estimated annual emissions at 0.033% of the nation’s forecast carbon “footprint”.  The second, at the disused airfield of R.A.F. North Weald, gave a figure of 0.043%. Foxglove, an independent organization appointed to monitor tech justice, has challenged both as being underestimated by a factor of five; the true figures being 0.165% and 0.215% respectively.

The lame excuse offered by Google that this was a genuine error which will be rectified with an amended planning application did not hold credence when it was discovered that a project of similar size in Lincolnshire submitted by the developer Greystoke had provided the same misinformation. Taken together, the emissions will total at least 1% of the UK´s estimated budget for year 2033.

The incredible response of the developer is that environmental assets such as the provision of bird and bat boxes and the planting of wild grassland on the campus have been added to a revised planning application.  This will continue to state the usual promotional twaddle that the development will bring full employment and social amenities such as sports clubs and schools to the local community.

During the last five years the world has witnessed an explosion of investment in the apparatus of the new digital industries the scale of which has never been seen before. Naturally, the elite Titans of Cyber-land (who lead tech companies which are approaching trillion-dollar valuations) have put together a vast public relations campaign which defends their pretensions through endpoint protection, cloud security and artificial intelligence.

One cannot avoid the daily incantations of paid influencers that appear in the media to extol the virtues and advantages of the New World which is about to envelop us. They play upon our imaginations to foresee Portugal as the gateway to a European wonderland with a green, secure environment for the benefit of all; provided that we accept without question what super intelligence thinks to be best for a vassal humanity.

The future of Sines as an industrial location should be to serve the best interests of the Portuguese people but, in reality, it increasingly appears to be destined as an enclave of foreign investment designed by super intelligence to create a digital world for the new breed of titanic trans-humans able to transcend historic tradition.

Reference: The Resident 13-05-2026 “Portugal – Green Energy”