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Norway is reopening three gasfields that it shut down last century as demand from Europe for alternatives to Russian and Middle Eastern supply increases.
The rich Scandinavian country’s centre-left government announced on Tuesday that the three North Sea fields — Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma — would restart production in 2028, four decades after they last pumped out any gas.
The move, which drew howls of protest from environmentalists and some of the government’s leftwing support parties, is designed to meet demand for gas from Germany and the UK, two of Norway’s biggest customers.
“Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe. The development of new gasfields helps Norway maintain high deliveries in the long term. This has become more important after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East,” said Terje Aasland, Norway’s energy minister.
Norway is western Europe’s largest petroleum producer, and has taken the crown from Russia as the main supplier of gas to many of the continent’s countries. Oslo has also increasingly positioned itself as the democratic oil and gas supplier of choice to try to force concessions out of Brussels in other areas, such as recognition of its right to drill in the Arctic.
Norway’s biggest three political parties are all firmly in favour of drilling for more oil and gas, and the minority Labour government also announced on Tuesday that it was offering 70 new blocks for exploration later this year. More than half of the blocks lie in the Barents Sea, inside the Arctic Circle.
But such exploration is controversial among smaller parties on which Labour depends for its parliamentary majority, while environmentalists argue that the world does not need new oil and gasfields if it wants to reach previously agreed climate targets.
Norway is often accused of hypocrisy on oil and gas, producing as much as possible and filling the coffers of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which has assets of more than $2tn, while at the same time pushing for climate change action abroad and heavily supporting the adoption of electric cars and buses at home.
The three gasfields to be reopened are situated off the south coast of Norway, near the giant Ekofisk field. They were in production from 1977 to 1988 and closed for good in 1998 but still contain an estimated 90mn-120mn barrels of oil equivalent in gas and condensate. They are set to reopen in 2028 and produce for a further two decades.
Gas will be exported to Germany and a lower amount of condensate to the UK. ConocoPhillips of the US, Vår Energi and Petoro of Norway, and Orlen of Poland are the licence holders for the fields.
