Aker BP CEO calls for oil and gas exploration, renewables push to protect Norwegian suppliers
(Bloomberg) – Norway must make more area available for oil and gas exploration and scale up the country’s nascent renewable sector in order to protect domestic suppliers of parts and services, according to the head of the country’s second biggest oil and gas company.
“We need as much acreage as is possible and whatever is hindered by environmental assessments, let’s do them and get that acreage onto the market,” Aker BP ASA Chief Executive Officer Karl Johnny Hersvik said in an interview on the sidelines of the ONS energy conference in Stavanger on Monday.
“And then I would like to see greater effort toward large-scale renewable activity. Not for the oil and gas industry, but because the supplier industry - that we have been investing in for so long now - they actually need it.”
In 2022, Norway’s two biggest oil companies, Aker BP and Equinor ASA, decided to move ahead with plans to spend about 200 billion kroner ($19 billion) to develop a string of fields in the North and Norwegian seas. The investment plans were driven by temporary Covid-era tax rules that were intended to spur petroleum investments during the pandemic.
While the package created jobs and activity at a time when suppliers faced empty order books, the outlook beyond 2026 remains unclear, Hersvik said. The volume of work coming from renewable development projects in Norway is still too small to offset a major decline in oil and gas exploration, he said.
