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3CHAPTER“Through thelooking-glass”the politician (cont.)fuzz around who was willing or had to cooperate with whom … nopolitically explicit actions known … there were also two projectsfrom the region of Groningen … the only Dutch project with similarityto ours is the Vattenfall/Nuon project … the UK competitors havemore in common … looking back: this has been a rather politicallyoriented procedure from the start but after the publication of thefinal call from the European Commission there was hardly anypolitical activity to be seen on my radar screen … I am very pleasedwith the application of our own project … it surely has helped thatthe PPP Team exchanged experiences with Rotterdam.Opportunities for our constituency … from a practical point ofview: inside the NER300 too many projects have applied … makescompetition for our project stronger … but: when we will be on thefinal shortlist, this will mean that high ranking external parties havevaluated our project positively … the outcome of such a selectionprocess will deliver more support for the next phase of negotiationswith the national government and more support from our ownparliament.Exposure (risks/opportunities) … the next step for all and also forour project is to survive the national selection procedure … nearlyall projects made their application public … so there might be someexposure in the newspapers or on TV … but the sentiments are notvery high at this moment (no negative attitudes observed in ourregion or our country, but fair enough also no independent positiveattitudes to be seen either) … national political signals are that theydo not want high level political interference during the selectionprocess … they want to give the signal that the selection processwas fair, unbiased and was only based on the content of the applications… I would like to argue that advocacy towards nationalgovernment and parliament should not take place; but I will stay inclose and explicit contact with the tender manager on the nationalside, to be in time when something should need to happen in thenational political arena.Overall Political judgment … the first step for application for theNER300 has shown that Europe has many potential CCS project …direct contesters for our project are few … easy to position ourproject in a positive way … that is what we need to do right now: tellthe story that our project is well defined, convincingly good andfeasible.46