ACE Winches said it has completed an order for Statoil for their subsea line modification project designed for use on the Troll B platform offshore Norway. The Norwegian operator had required a rental Pull in Winch System including wire rope and HPU. The rental package supplied incorporated a compact design and weight optimized linear winch, designed for use in land based shore pulls and offshore wire rope deployment and recovery operations.
Total has signed an agreement to sell a 15% interest in the Gina Krog field in Norway to Tellus Petroleum in a NOK1.4billion deal. The French company’s president of exploration and production said the move was as a result of a “full comparative review” of its global asset portfolio. The transaction still has to be approved by the Norwegian authorities.
MOL Group will be continuing its focus on the UKCS and Norway after snapping up assets in both regions since last year. Brian Glover, exploration and business development senior vice president for the company, spoke exclusively to Energy Voice as it visited the firm's headquarters in Hungary. Everyday this week Energy Voice will be briefing from Hungary on the latest developments in MOL's operations across the globe.
Norway, western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer, warned companies that failing to extract less profitable barrels could weaken their chances of getting exploration blocks in a new area of the Arctic Barents Sea.
Aker Solutions has teamed with German firm Man Diesel & Turbo to develop the next-generation in subsea compression systems that can be used even at the smallest oil and gas fields.
Norwegian oil companies are turning on the spigots to counter plunging crude prices.
Statoil has awarded the NOK600million ($74.5million) contract for construction of the converter station at Haugsneset to the field to Norwegian firm Aibel.
Preliminary production figures for North Sea oil production in Norway for September 2015 showed a slight dip from the previous month before.
Offshore supply vessel owners are facing a "very tough" 2016 with the prospect of much of the supply fleet being laid up due to the oil slump.
From Oslo to Doha, Riyadh to Moscow, governments that rode crude’s historic rise to unprecedented wealth are now being forced to start repatriating their rainy- day funds just to make ends meet. The halving of oil to less than $50 a barrel has the potential to alter one of the most powerful economic and political forces of the past half century: the rise of the petrostate. These countries led a surge in state investments in the U.S. and Europe that now totals about $7.3 trillion globally, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. During the last boom, the oil countries flaunted their wealth abroad by buying stakes in iconic companies such as Barclays Plc as well as trophy assets including Manhattan hotels, European soccer clubs and London luxury homes, often in the face of opposition from the local public. Such swagger is fading.
Statoil said a spill has been discovered during the loading of oil from the Statfjord A platform tanker offshore Norway. The company said loading to the tanker has been stopped and supply to the pipe and loading system from Statfjord A has been closed. A spokesman said production from Statfjord A is operating normally in the meantime.
As Norway prepares to make the first withdrawals from its $820 billion wealth fund, the government is considering letting it take on riskier investments. The Finance Ministry is looking into whether to boost the fund’s stock allocation to beyond 60 percent as the investor struggles with record low bond yields. The government is forming a panel to assess the impact of changing the limit that will report back in 2017.
Statoil remained tight-lipped on reports that the Aasta Hansteen gas field off Norway could be delayed until 2018 due to delays in constructing its platform.
Talks are taking place between Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s LetterOne Group about purchasing stakes in a number of Norwegian oil and gas fields, according to reports. According to the Financial Times the company is looking to gain assets owned by Eon in a deal estimated to be worth $1billion. The move signals a break away from the UKCS after the government urged LetterOne to sell North Sea assets.
Norway’s government will propose spending a record amount of its petroleum wealth to cover budget needs as it seeks to rescue the economy from the plunge in oil prices, according to state broadcaster NRK. The minority coalition plans on spending a record 193 billion kroner ($23 billion) of oil income in 2016, up from an estimated 168.8 billion kroner this year, NRK reported, without citing where it got the information. That represents 2.8 percent of its wealth fund, the world’s biggest, NRK said. The government seeks to keep oil cash spending within 4 percent of the value of the fund. The budget will be revealed at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Oslo. “The budget will be well-adapted to handle challenges both in the short and long term,” Finance Minister Siv Jensen said to reporters as she was leaving her house early Wednesday. It will be a “good” and “expansionary” spending plan, she said.
A decision by the Norwegian minority government to start making withdrawals from the country’s sovereign fund could mark a “radical change” for the region. Leading expert Professor Jon Kleppe, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, said the sovereign fund has risen from NOK 6300billion at the start of the year to NOK 7000billion. He said the increase was largely down to the weakening of the Norwegian Kroner next to the US dollar.
A brand new oil company has been launched in Norway, despite the current industry slump. Okea is the second to be born in the country since the summer of 2015 when Origo was rolled out at Offshore Northern Seas. And it is the fourth over this period if the two UK companies Verus (derived from Bridge Energy) and Siccar Point are included. All have private equity funding underpinning them. In the case of Okea, Seacrest Capital Group has got behind the newly created oil & gas development and production company headquartered in Trondheim.
For Norway, the future may already be here.
Norwegian shipping heavyweight GC Rieber has agreed to take early redelivery of the survey vessel Polar Duke from Dolphin Geophysical as part of an overall restructuring agreement to improve Dolphin's competitiveness in a challenging market.
Centrica has been given the go-ahead by Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority to drill a shallow pilot hole to establish there is no shallow gas in block 8/10 in the North Sea prior to further activity in the prospect.
Farstad Shipping said it has laid up two PSV and three AHTS in Norway amid a weakening North Sea market. The move means 100 employees are to be made redundant. The company said it was now fully focused on securing contracts and employment of vessels and crews.
Maersk Oil has made a minor gas discovery in the Norwegian North Sea but has decided it is profitable at this stage.
Oil giant Shell has completed the sale of Smart Fuel to St1 Nordic Oy of some of its downstream businesses in Norway. The company said it would still continue to remain highly visible in the country, despite the deal for its retail, commercial fuels and supply and distribution logistics businesses. Shell and St1 have also joined forced to create Aviation Fuelling Services Norway AS, a joint venture to sell aviation fuel in Norway.
Statoil and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have signed an agreement on research funding for future energy solutions. The group, with a total budget of NOK 50million over the next four years, will look to build-up a research group which can help develop sustainable energy solutions. The first move will be to recruit a researcher who can guide the work and build up the research group based at NTNU in Trondheim.
A court in Oslo has ruled in favour of Norway in a lawsuit involving a group of international investors. They had argued that the country’s decision to cut natural gas pipeline tariffs would have cost them more than $1billion in lost earnings by 2028. The four firms owned by funds including Allianz, UBS, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board alleged that Norway had illegally cut fees on the 8,000lm Gassled gas pipeline network. The four firms have said they would consider whether to appeal the decision.