Norway expands area for Barents frontier exploration

Norway has awarded three new frontier exploration licences in the Barents Sea and one in the Norwegian Sea in its 25th oil and gas licensing round.

Norway's numbered licensing rounds are normally held every other year and focus on frontier areas. The country also holds annual licensing rounds for mature areas with infrastructure in place.

In this latest round, seven companies have been offered stakes in the four licences, with state-controlled Equinor awarded two operating stakes. When the round was announced last year, companies were invited to apply for licences in eight Barents Sea areas and one Norwegian Sea area, or a total of 125 block or part-blocks in the Barents Sea and 11 in the Norwegian Sea. The 25th round attracted less interest than the previous two rounds — 11 firms participated in the 24th round and 26 in the 23rd round.

The latest licence awards come just days after climate activists aiming to stop new oil and gas drilling in Norway's Arctic territory took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, having lost their fight at the Supreme Court of Norway last December. Norwegian energy minister Tina Bru today defended the government's policy on exploration, saying that the licensing rounds facilitate activity on the Norwegian shelf. "This is important for employment and value creation in the Norwegian oil and gas industry," she said.

The government's white paper on long-term value creation from Norway's energy resources, published earlier this month, envisages that the petroleum sector will remain a significant factor in the Norwegian economy in the years to come, although not on the same scale as today.

"We will facilitate a future-oriented Norwegian oil and gas industry capable of delivering production with low emissions within the framework of our climate policy," Bru said when the white paper was launched. "The main goal of the government's petroleum policy — to facilitate profitable production in the oil and gas industry in a long term perspective — is firmly in place."

Barents Sea push

Norway has long touted the exploration potential of the Barents Sea, and earlier this month offered 70 new blocks in the region in its latest licensing round for mature areas. But drilling has yielded disappointing results in recent years. There are still only two producing fields in Norway's section of the Barents, the Snohvit gas field and the Goliat oil field, although Equinor is developing the much-delayed 400mn-650mn bl Johan Castberg project in the region.

Equinor said today that the location of its two new Barents Sea licences will enable any future discoveries to be tied back to the undeveloped Wisting field. The firm said a final investment decision to develop Wisting is scheduled to be taken by the end of 2022.

By Konstantin Rozhnov