Category: Norway

Norwegian oil company Statoil AS A has postponed its 2020 production target of 2.5 million barrels a day by three to four years and is reducing its planned capital expenditure, as the company looks to chase margins over big production numbers. Statoil said it would lower its planned capital expenditure to an average of $20 billion a year through 2016, a reduction of 8%, to free up cash. Statoil Chief Executive Helge Lund said in an interview in London that the company will cut costs $1.3 billion a year starting in 2016 in a bid to counter escalating oil sector costs. "We have been working actively with costs for several years and have seen this as a major development, but now we are turning it up a couple notches," Mr. Lund said. "These are still Statoil’s highest investments ever, so this isn’t a defensive plan." The state-controlled company is […]

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Norwegian oil company Statoil said Friday it had a successful 2013 in terms of oil and gas reserves generated from its exploration activity. Statoil said Friday it "delivered the best oil and gas exploration results in the industry" last year in terms of conventional oil and gas discoveries. Last year, the company said its Bay du Nord discovery off the eastern coast of Canada was one of the largest for 2013 with at least 300 million barrels of recoverable oil. In its report Friday, it said the Canadian discovery contributed to the addition of 1.25 billion barrels of oil equivalent from exploration activity in 2013. "Our operational performance was good," Helge Lund , Statoil’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement Friday. The company said it plans to spend $3.5 billion on exploration activity in 2014, though its overall planned investment […]

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Norway , which has watched its crude output fall every year since 2000, wants to attract large producers to compete with Statoil ASA (STL) as the state-controlled company cancels and delays key projects. Western Europe’s largest oil and gas producer now needs a broader group of big companies with the technological know-how and financial strength to help develop resources, Petroleum and Energy Minister Tord Lien said. “We need more large players,” Lien, who took power in October, said yesterday in an interview in Oslo. Statoil last year delayed an investment decision on its Johan Castberg oil project in the Arctic Barents Sea, citing rising costs and a tax increase by the previous government. It then pushed back by a year the start of its Johan Sverdrup field, delaying what may be the biggest Norwegian oil discovery since 1974. The company also scrapped plans for a pipeline to the Kristin […]

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