Norwegian oil and gas producers are spending billions to squeeze output from the country’s mature continental shelf. While exports have dropped from what they were in the early 2000s, July crude loadings from the country were forecast to reached the most since at least 2012, according to consultant FGE NexantECA.
Norway has started to plan its 26th oil and gas licensing round in little explored frontier areas as it looks to boost exploration and resources to stem an expected decline in production from the early 2030s.
The Barents Sea oilfield, Norway’s northernmost, reached peak production less than three months after start-up, with oil cargoes worth up to USD 46 million departing every few days. Norwegian suppliers provide 95% of operational deliveries.
SLB OneSubsea has been awarded an EPC contract by Equinor for a subsea CO2 injection system for phase two of the Northern Lights project offshore Norway, SLB said on Wednesday.
A major Norwegian oil field is taking the industry’s use of drones for safety inspections to a new level, with a permanently installed aircraft that’s operated remotely from the shore.
From a control room in Norway’s oil capital of Stavanger, pilots are performing drone inspections of the Edvard Grieg platform some 180 kilometers out at sea. The technology is a step toward fully autonomous inspections, requiring fewer workers to be sent offshore, according to its operator Aker Solutions ASA.
OKEA ASA and its partners in production license 055 have made a discovery that is estimated to hold 300,000 to 2.8 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent along the eastern flank of the already producing Brage field on Norway’s side of the North Sea.
Considering that “very few new developments have occurred since 2022”, it is not surprising that a moderate decline in investments in field development is indicated this year. But this decline in investment in field development is being offset by expectations of a very high planned investment activity in fields on stream, the statistics office said.
In March Equinor ASA said it has put onstream the Halten East field in the Norwegian Sea, increasing Norway’s capacity to export gas to Europe. Halten East, a tie-in to be developed in two phases, holds about 100 million barrels of oil equivalent recoverable reserves, according to the Norwegian majority state-owned energy company.
Subsea7 has been awarded a front-end engineering and design contract by ConocoPhillips Skandinavia for the Previously Produced Fields development project offshore Norway, Subsea7 said on Monday.
The new reserve was located at the Goktepe-3 well, situated 69 kilometres west of the Sakarya gasfield and 165 kilometres offshore, following 49 days of drilling by the high-tech vessel Abdulhamid Han. The well lies at a depth of 3,500 metres, and exploration began on March 27. The discovery, officially announced on May 16, is expected to meet the country’s residential natural gas demand for three and a half years.
Norway is currently Europe’s largest single supplier of natural gas and also the largest producer of oil in the West. The country, which also sports some of the highest low-carbon generation capacity thanks to its abundant water resources, plans to maintain this status by investing more in both oil and gas despite net-zero plans.