Norway’s Prime Minister said workers who will decided the fate of the country’s oil industry had not even been “born yet” as it was revealed jobs would continue to be lost this year.
Erna Solberg spoke at the annual conference of the Norwegian Oil Industry Association in Oslo.
The politician was presenting the government’s petroleum policy at the even where it was shown the number of oil industry jobs had dropped to 148,000 from 186,000 in 2014.
Meanwhile, another 12,000 positions are likely to be erased before the downward trend halts in 2018, according to the report by research group Iris, which was commissioned by the Norwegian Oil & Gas Association.
Solberg said the “oil adventure” was not over, and would continue for “decades to come” before adding that “whoever shall extinguish the light on the Norwegian shelf is not born yet”.
Between 2018 and 2020, oil and gas companies and suppliers are expected to create 13,000 new jobs.
In addition, about 9,000 people will retire from existing jobs, resulting in a need to hire about 22,000 new people over the two-year period.
Karl Eirik Schjott-Pedersen, director general of the Norwegian Oil & Gas Association, said: “We do not hand out job guarantees. But based on these new figures, we can say that those who start a technological education in the autumn of 2016 have a strong possibility of being greeted with open arms by the oil and gas industry when they graduate.”
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