Norwegian Oil Research Articles

Microbial Extractions: Sequence-based Bioprospecting, Augmented Promises, and Elusive Politics

In view of the end of the golden years of the Norwegian oil economy, ocean genetic resources are being advertised in policy environments as holding great potential for the future of the country. Microbes have increased in popularity as promising agents of the Norwegian new bioeconomy, as advances in gene sequencing technologies and genomics have made them more accessible. This paper examines the turn toward digital sequence data in bioprospecting to inquire about its political implications. It draws on a combination of empirical materials to describe the infrastructural work that goes into extracting microbes from their in situ locations in arctic and subarctic waters to in silico collections and databases. I argue that in that infrastructural work, microbes may become both more promising and more elusive public and political matters. As biodiversity is turned into data, bioprospecting appears as less dependent on material samples, which may ultimately render policy frameworks for biodiversity governance obsolete. The shift toward big sequence data in bioprospecting entails shifts in how promise is attributed to biodiversity, which life forms appear to be more promising, and how such life forms come to appear as public good.

Norwegian oil market concentration and its effects on the oil service companies 1993–2013

AbstractThis paper explores the effect of market concentration of the Norwegian oil production sector (NPS) on Norway's second‐largest industry, the oilfield services companies (OFS). To capture this effect, we use the system generalized method of moments approach (GMM) to estimate an empirical model, spanning the period 1993–2013. The findings indicate that increased market concentration is consistent with lower profitability of the oilfield services companies, as the bargaining power of oil companies relative to service companies increases. Increased knowledge about this effect could contribute to improving strategies for the further development of these industries by stakeholders.

ORGANIZATION OF RISK-MANAGEMENT IN EQUINOR ASA

The article reveals modern approaches to enterprise risk management based on the introduction of ERM (enterprise risk management) system, aimed at the integration of all types of risks in the company's strategy and the transition from protection from negative situations to the concept of risk appetite. The special importance of risk management for oil and gas companies in the conditions of global instability and high price volatility is emphasized. The author analyzes the experience of the Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor in the development and implementation of ERM, changes in the organization of risk management and methods of analysis and evaluation.

It's a Man's World? Gender Spillover Effects on Performance in a Male-Dominated Industry.

Getting more women into male-dominated industries has become the nucleus of public debate in many industrialized countries. However, it is still not clear how growing female representation impacts the individual performance of workers in these sectors. The research setting of this study is the Norwegian oil industry as a typically male-dominated sector. Using a fixed-effects regression model, the present paper investigates two different constellations: 1) how growing female representation impacts the individual performance of workers at the same hierarchical level (within-ranks); 2) how growing female representation at the next highest rank impacts the performance of subordinated workers (downward-flowing). Consistent with prevailing theory, the within-ranks analysis reveals that the performance of men in relation to a higher share of female peers follows a cubic pattern. This shows that men’s performance is the highest in gender-balanced teams. For women, this relationship cannot be confirmed. In terms of downward-flowing effects, female supervisors in this particular industry are estimated to have a negative effect on the performance of both, men and women. This result on negative downward-flowing effects requires a deeper analysis on the corporate cultural background.

A Norwegian Oil Company Could Play a Key Role in Brazil’s Gas Transformation

Equinor could play a critical role in Brazil’s drive to boost its economy by opening up its gas markets. The Norwegian oil company operates two huge deepwater blocks with enough gas to lower prices in the country where big users pay some of the highest prices in the world. The development plan for one of those blocks, BM-C-33 in the Campos Basin, would deliver an average of 14 million m3/d of gas—about 15% of the country’s gas demand on a high-consumption day, which is about 92 million m3/d, based on data from Rystad. A second project in the heart of the presalt, Bacalhau, could become a model for how an international oil company can market gas successfully in the country’s richest oil play, the Santos Basin presalt. The gas potential in that play is also huge; the gas/oil ratio is high compared with other Brazilian fields but has largely been untapped. So far, Equinor and its partners in the projects have not committed to developing gas on either lease, but Equinor appears to be seriously considering doing so. The big question it needs to answer is what the gas market there will look like in a year or so. Brazil has set out to promote domestic gas supplies by ending Petrobras’ virtual monopoly in the pipeline business in favor of a less-regulated, competitive gas market. Equinor avoided gas sales at Bacalhau with an $8 billion Phase 1 plan that will use the popular practice of reinjecting produced gas. Gas reinjection maintains reservoir pressure and allows the development to comply with Brazil’s ban on routine flaring. Brazil’s energy regulator, ANP, said that when Equinor develops a plan for its second phase of development, the company needs to con-sider gas production. The role of gas market pioneer is the latest technical challenge taken on by Equinor in Brazil. Previously, it became the operator of an offshore heavy-oil field—Perigrino—and an aging giant—Roncador—both in the Campos Basin. While the Norwegian company has not promised to take on that role, it has a huge incentive to do so as the operator of Block BM-C-33, where most of the reserves are in the form of gas. The resource is estimated at 3 Tcf of gas and 700 million bbl of condensate, according to Offshore Technology. Equinor and its partners Repsol and Petrobras have developed a plan that would move the liquids by tanker from the platform, which is in water as deep as 2900 m, and build a pipeline about 200 km from there to shore. When asked about the status of the project, Geir Tungesvik, senior vice president for project development at Equinor, said the company is working to “improve the business case.” A Potential Case Study Tungesvik’s bland description fails to reflect the risks and uncertainties faced by those trying to put together offshore gas marketing plans in Brazil. If Equinor and its partners go forward with their plan to monetize that massive gas reserve, the result is likely to be a case study for those who follow. It could either be a model for successful development or a cautionary tale.

The Norwegian Oil Fund in a Warming World: What are the Interests of Future Generations?

ABSTRACT The intended beneficiaries of the Norwegian Oil Fund are current and future generations of Norwegians, with the interests of current generations served through the expenditure of revenues on public services and the interests of future generations met by increasing the value of the fund. This formulation is reexamined in light of climate change and found to be narrow and incomplete and in tension with reducing carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. I argue that a collective vision encompassing the financial and non-financial interests of current and future generations is needed and highlight the role of greater public deliberation.

Integration of Highly Skilled Migrants in the Workplace: a Multi-level Framework

This article combines literatures on immigrant integration and migration intermediaries to add a skilled perspective to theories of immigrant integration. Using a case study of foreign-born engineers in the Norwegian oil and gas industry, we develop a multi-level conceptual framework of actors that are involved in the integration of foreign-born engineers. We identified integration actors through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with human resource managers, foreign-born workers, and other integration actors. The framework is intended as a tool to move beyond single-level, unidirectional studies of immigrant integration and to provide a more in-depth understanding of the integration of highly skilled migrants in the workplace. We find that state actors fail to assist with the long-term integration for highly skilled migrants. Instead, private and voluntary actors provide information about work regulations and working life. In addition, employers and coworkers play an important role in the integration of highly skilled migrants in the workplace. We also find that highly skilled migrants can be agents of integration as they “scale up” initiatives to higher levels of decision-making.

Syzygy gets funds for light-driven synthesis

Syzygy Plasmonics has raised $23 million in series B funding from investors that include the Norwegian oil company Equinor. The firm, one of C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch in 2019 , wants to use ligh...

Norwegian Oil Experience and The Possibility of Benefiting From it in Iraq

It is obvious that the oil sector in Iraq is suffering from major problems related to oil infrastructure, in terms of extraction, production, transport, storage and export outlets. Generally, it is often said that the economic policy including the oil policy, have been failed in setting the short- and long-term plans to manage and best use the oil wealth. Although there are a number of official institutions to manage oil industry in Iraq, there is no competent authority in the area of investment and management of surplus reserves which is deposited in a development fund of Iraq (DFI). It is emphasized that Iraq’s need to invest these reserves, despite the existence of some intersections between the monetary policy and the fiscal policy. Yet, oil revenues, constitute more than 90% of the public budget of the country. On the other hand, the Norway experience has become a successful model in the oil industry among oil export countries, includes the level of extraction, manufacture and export of oil derivatives. it is possible to benefit from its experience in this sector through attempting to apply its oil investment policy and to be guided in all phases of the oil industry. As a result of its remarkable success is achieved in the oil sector, the researcher will study all development stages and the reasons for the success regarding the oil industry in Norway, particularly in term of establishing sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and its role in economic and financial stability

Not in transition: Inter-infrastructural governance and the politics of repair in the Norwegian oil and gas offshore industry

In the past three decades, there has been an increasing interest in transitions as crucial analytical moments of socio-technical change, with infrastructures being strategic loci from where to leverage these transformations. In this article, we argue for the necessity to re-engage with not-in-transition periods, which have theoretically and analytically been oversimplified. By focusing on the socio-technical practices of repair across interconnected infrastructures under not-in-transition conditions, we provide a better understanding of how these periods are (re)produced. Our in-depth case study of the Norwegian offshore oil and gas (O&G) drilling industry shows how stability can be ensured by means of inter-infrastructural governance carried on by specific power constellations, i.e. action nodes. The way they mould infrastructural components is revealed when normal operations are endangered by adverse events, such as accidents or economic crises.

Paradoxes of power: Dialogue as a regulatory strategy in the Norwegian oil and gas industry

This paper explores how the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway applied dialogue as a key feature in the regulatory strategy and practice over a ten-year period from 2009 to 2019. The analysis, drawing on theories on regulation and sensemaking, explores power relations and identity construction in encounters between the regulator and regulatees. The data material comprises texts from web-sites, documents, investigation reports and focus group interviews. We conclude that the dialogue is embedded with paradoxes, infused with power, yet functions as a potent policy instrument. The power base of the regulatory authorities partly depends on enterprises’ and the industry’s need for a good reputation. We expand the theoretical framework by highlighting paradoxes of power and introducing the concepts of ‘sensesharing’ and ‘conditional sensegiving’.

Mud-Gas Breakthrough Equinor Develops Real-Time Reservoir-Fluid Identification

For all that logging-while-drilling has provided since its wide-spread adoption in the 1980s, there is one thing on the industry’s wish list that it could never offer: an accurate way to tell the difference between oil and gas. A new technology created by petrotechnicals at Equinor, however, has made this possible. The innovation could be thought of as a pseudo-log, but Equinor is describing it as a reservoir-fluid-identification system. Using an internally developed machine-learning model, it compares a database of more than 4,000 reservoir samples against the real-time analysis of the mud gas that flows up a well as it is drilled. Crunched out of the technology’s various hardware and software components is a prediction on the gas/oil ratio (GOR) that the rock being drilled through will have once it is producing. Since this happens in real time, it boils down to an alert system for when drillers are tapping into uneconomic pay zones. “This is something people have tried to do for 30 years - using partial information to predict entire oil and gas properties,” said Tao Yang. He added that “the data acquisition is rather cheap compared with all the downhole tools, and it doesn’t cost you rig time,” highlighting that the mud-gas analyzer critical to the process sits on a rig or platform without interfering with drilling operations. Yang is a reservoir technology specialist at Equinor and one of the authors of a technical paper (SPE 201323) about the new digital technology that was presented at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in October. He and his colleagues spent more than 3 years building the system which began in the Norwegian oil company’s Houston office as a project to improve pressure/volume/temperature (PVT) analysis in tight-oil wells in North America. It has since found a home in the company’s much larger offshore business unit in Stavanger. Offshore projects designed around certain oil-production targets can face harsh realities when they end up producing more associated gas than expected. It is the difference between drilling an underperforming well full of headaches and one that will pay out hundreds of millions of dollars over its lifetime. By introducing real-time fluid identification, Equinor is trying to enforce a new control on that risk by giving drillers the information they need to pull the bit back and start drilling a side-track deeper into the formation where the odds are better of finding higher proportions of oil or condensates. At the conference, Yang shared details about some of the first field implementations, saying that in most cases the GOR predictions made by the fluid-identification system were confirmed by traditional PVT analysis from the trial wells. Unlike other advancements made on this front, he also said the new approach is the first of its kind to combine such a large database of PVT data with a machine-learning model “that is common to any well.” That means “we do not need to know where this well is located” to make a GOR prediction, said Yang.

Norwegian oil and gas storage in rock caverns – Technology based on experience from hydropower development

Underground storage in rock caverns is widely used in Norway for many different petroleum products, such as crude oil, fuel, propane and butane. Basically, the caverns for such storages are unlined, i.e. containment is ensured without using any steel lining or membrane. The main basis for the storage technology originates from the extensive hydropower development in Norway. As part of this activity, about 4500 km of tunnels and shafts have been excavated, and around 200 large powerhouse caverns have been constructed. The hydropower tunnels are mainly unlined, with hydrostatic water pressure on unlined rock of up to 1000 m. Some of the projects also include air cushion chambers with volumes of up to 1 × 10 5 m 3 and air pressure up to 7.7 MPa. Many lessons which are valuable also for underground oil and gas storage have been learnt from these projects. For a storage project to become successful, systematic, well planned design and ground investigation procedures are crucial. The main steps of the design procedure are first to define the optimum location of the project, and then to optimize orientation, shape/geometry and dimensions of caverns and tunnels. As part of the procedure, ground investigations have to be carried out at several steps integrated with the progress of design. The investigation and design procedures, and the great significance of these for the project to become successful will be discussed. Case examples of oil and gas storage in unlined rock caverns are given, illustrating the relevancy of experience from high-pressure hydropower projects for planning and design of unlined caverns for oil and gas storage.

Climate-Related Stress Testing

This paper explores three possible transmission channels for transition risk shocks to the financial system in Norway. First, we estimate the direct firm-level impact of a substantial increase in domestic carbon prices under severe assumptions. Second, we map the impact of a drastic increase in global carbon prices on the domestic economy via the Norwegian oil sector. Third, we model the impact of a forced reduction in Norwegian oil firms’ output on shareholder portfolios. Results show that such a sharp increase in carbon prices would have a significant but manageable impact on banks. Finally, the paper discusses ways to advance the still evolving field of transition risk stress testing.

Introducing Norwegian Oil and Gas Model in Russia: Institutional Challenges

While the Norwegian oil and gas model is a popular reference case in Russia, one should realize that it has developed over time within a specific national, historical and institutional context. The core role in this model belongs to the Norwegian state in terms of resource management, establishing the regulatory framework, massive taxation, and actual involvement in the business, first of all through the national petroleum company Statoil/Equinor. Equinor has evolved since 1972 from a modest carried partner to a large streamlined corporation, operating in 35 countries and focusing heavily on global technological leadership. All investors, either state-owned or private, are put under the same public scrutiny and stimulated with non-fiscal incentives, such as political stability, predictable regulations and abundant geological information. This large scale government intervention relies on proactive, professional and incorrupt bureaucracy enjoying broad powers. Much of this practice is not common and may not be introduced directly in Russia, which tends to limit the role of public servants and rely on big state corporations. However, the Norwegian experience seems very relevant for the urgently needed overhaul of the Russian energy policies, both offshore and in Western Siberia

Climate beliefs in an oil-dependent economy: Norwegian pre-service science teachers’ attitudes towards climate change

A large proportion of people in western societies do not believe in the concept of human-induced climate change (HICC), and oil-dependent economies might be expected to have more climate contrarian populations than others. Recent recessions in the Norwegian oil industry caused an influx of dismissed oil engineers into Norwegian science teacher education. With their background in the natural sciences and associations with the oil industry, this group of pre-service teachers might express mixed attitudes towards HICC and how to approach this subject while teaching. A survey of students attending a one-year course for qualifying people with a university degree in science as science teachers was conducted. Association with the oil industry covaries with climate skeptic thinking and reluctance towards teaching about HICC in these groups of students. This suggests that a green shift might create an influx of climate contrarian views into schools in oil-dependent economies.

Other stories of resilient safety management in the Norwegian offshore sector: Resilience engineering, bullshit and the de-politicization of danger

This paper explores the different conceptual meanings of the term resilience as it is used and interpreted by industry actors in the Norwegian oil and gas industry, as well as the possible wider ramifications of this use. This is done by presenting three different theoretical readings, or stories, of the recent proliferation of the term in the industry. The stories are supported by empirical material stemming from document studies, interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in the industry. Safety Management academics and practitioners in the industry generally rely on conceptions derived from Resilience Engineering (RE), which is consequently the perspective used in the first story. Here, we outline the RE-perspective and explore how it might justify the spread of, and apparent need for, resilience, as well as those empirical qualities of operations that the concept purports to refer to. The second story utilizes the concept of organizational bullshit in order to examine some of the ways in which the resilience concept is used to impress and invoke organizational legitimacy, without necessarily having much tangible connection to day-to-day operations. The third reading connects the resilience concept to the rise of neoliberalism, and explores its potential for depoliticizing risk and danger as well as facilitating the responsibilization of offshore workers. In addition to presenting the different conceptual meanings of resilience in the Norwegian oil and gas sector, the paper also provides resources for discussing the potential ramifications of these conceptions

Climate-Related Stress Testing: Transition Risks in Norway

This paper explores three possible transmission channels for transition risk shocks to the financial system in Norway. First, we estimate the direct firm-level impact of a substantial increase in domestic carbon prices under severe assumptions. Second, we map the impact of a drastic increase in global carbon prices on the domestic economy via the Norwegian oil sector. Third, we model the impact of a forced reduction in Norwegian oil firms' output on shareholder portfolios. Results show that such a sharp increase in carbon prices would have a significant but manageable impact on banks. Finally, the paper discusses ways to advance the still evolving field of transition risk stress testing.

Corporate entrepreneurship and sustainability transitions: resource redeployment of oil and gas industry firms in floating wind power

ABSTRACTIt has been recently argued that the vast resources of established firms can potentially accelerate sustainability transitions. This paper contributes to the study of such possibilities by investigating the resource redeployment of three Norwegian oil and gas industry firms in corporate ventures in floating wind power technologies. Using interview and document data, the findings show that the opportunity to use existing firm resources was a key motivation for established firms to engage in entrepreneurship in such technologies. The firms could redeploy their specialised and general-purpose resources in these entrepreneurial ventures, and develop new technologies on the basis of their existing resources. However, also challenges and controversies were observed. This paper thus suggests that the process of resource redeployment can help to explain why, and describe how, established firms may engage in cleantech innovation through corporate entrepreneurship.

Data-driven failure analysis of emergency shutdown systems in oil and gas industry

Purpose Emergency shutdown (ESD) systems play a critical role in ensuring safety and availability of oil and gas production. The systems are operated in on-demand mode, and the detection and prediction of their failures is deemed challenging. The purpose of this paper is to develop a logical data-driven approach to enhance the understanding and detectability of ESD system failures. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted in close collaboration with the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The study and analyses were supported by industrial data, failure data generated in a test facility in Norway and domain experts. Findings The paper demonstrated that there is a considerable potential to improve the decision process and to reduce the workload related to ESD systems by means of a logical data-driven approach. The results showed that the failure analysis process can be executed with more clarity and efficiency. Common cause failures could also be identified based on the suggested approach. The study further underlined the requirements regarding relevant data, new competence and technical supports in order to improve the current practice. Originality/value The paper leveraged the value of real-time data in identifying failures through mapping of the interrelationships between data, failure mechanisms and decisions. The failure analysis process was re-designed, and the understanding and decision making related to the system was improved as a result. The process developed for ESDs can further be adapted as a common practice for other low-demand systems.