Page 11 - EurOil Week 24 2021

EurOil POLICY EurOil

Norway sticks with oil, gas

NORWAY NORWAY will continue producing oil and gas new grid installations.”
until 2050 and beyond, its centre-right govern- Norway also wants to ramp up carbon, cap-
The country will also ment announced in a strategy on June 11, reject- ture and storage (CCS) capacity, building on its
continue to hold regular ing a path to phase out hydrocarbon that other 5mn tonne-per-year Longship plan, led by state-
oil and gas licensing European producers have pursued. owned Equinor.
rounds, although it The country will also continue to hold regular Norway’s ongoing support for oil and gas
expects its production oil and gas licensing rounds, although it expects contrasts with some other European countries
to decline naturally by its production to decline naturally by 65% by like Denmark, Ireland and Spain, which have
65% by 2050. 2050. all implemented bans on licensing and declared
“We will facilitate a future-oriented Norwe- they will phase out hydrocarbon output. It also
gian oil and gas industry capable of delivering conflicts with the International Energy Agency
products with low emissions within the frame- (IEA)’s recent recommendation that countries
work of our climate policy,” Norwegian Petro- should end investments in new oil and gas pro-
leum Minister Tina Bru told a news conference. jects as the world strives towards net-zero emis-
Despite sticking with oil and gas, Norway sions. The Paris-based agency acknowledged
nevertheless intends to embrace hydrogen and that this would mean low-cost producers like
offshore wind technology, according to the gov- OPEC members dominating supply in the dec-
ernment’s strategy. It has released a roadmap for ades to come.
creating hydrogen hubs by 2050, and it wants The Norwegian Oil and Gas Association
to award its first offshore wind farm licences in (NOGA) responded to the IEA’s report saying it
2022. did not “share the assumption that OPEC mem-
The government also wants to use hydroe- bers alone should account for more than half of
lectric power to reduce emissions at its oil and oil and gas production for the world market in a
gas platforms offshore. Norway has already used 2050 perspective.”
this process of electrification extensively, reduc- “If demand does not decline as rapidly as the
ing Scope 1 and 2 emissions from extraction IEA assumes in its scenario, and the supply side
considerably. It wants to strengthen the national is simultaneously choked off, global energy pro-
power grid to help achieve this, but Bru said it vision could be threatened and lead to very high
“currently takes too long to plan and approve energy prices.” ™

Week 24 17•June•2021 www. NEWSBASE .com P11