How Norway enlisted new tech in hunt for ‘missing’ oil

Going against conventional wisdom, explorers at a Norwegian energy company drilled horizontally to find oil in an abandoned natural gas field, writes Stanley Reed from London

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A model of a giant rig called the DeepSea Stavanger that was used to find oil in Norway's waters.

(PHOTOS BY NYT)

Five years ago, explorers at a Norwegian oil company called Aker BP had a contrarian idea.

They believed there might be a lot of oil lurking in an offshore natural gas field that was thought to be played out, and they persuaded Aker BP to let them go after this “missing” oil.

Their hunch has paid off in significant oil discoveries. In recent months, for instance, Aker BP has located a series of troves, known collectively as Omega Alfa, that may produce more than 130 million barrels of recoverable oil, the largest find in Norwegian waters this year.

“It was an intense summer for most of us,” Hanna Tronstad, a drilling superintendent, said while monitoring screens at the control centre for the exploration work in a former hotel in Trondheim, a Norwegian port city.

In making the discoveries, Aker BP’s explorers not only tested intellectual concepts, but also pushed physical limits, drilling horizontal wells nearly seven miles long, a record for Norway.

Norway supplies roughly 30% of Europe’s natural gas demand and around 15% of its oil, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm. Those volumes help give it great strategic and economic importance, especially with reduced energy flows from Russia because of the war in Ukraine.

Despite more than 50 years of production, Norway's overall output of oil and gas has held relatively steady for the last three decades.

“It’s kind of amazing how you see projected decline not happening,” said Egil Tjaland, an associate professor of geoscience at Trondheim's Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where many oil industry professionals have studied.

CONSUME LESS, EXPORT MORE

Avoiding decline in the coming years will require ingenuity as well as investment, analysts say.