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Norway Is Walking Away from Billions of Barrels of Oil

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-how-long dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Bloomberg:

Western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer is falling out of love with oil.

To the dismay of the nation’s powerful oil industry and its worker unions, the opposition Labor Party over the weekend decided to withdraw its support for oil exploration offshore the sensitive Lofoten islands in Norway’s Arctic, creating a solid majority in parliament to keep the area off limits for drilling.

The dramatic shift by Norway’s biggest party is a significant blow to the support the oil industry has enjoyed, and could signal that the Scandinavian nation is coming closer to the end of an era that made it one of the world’s most affluent.

How will Norway pay for its social safety network without oil revenues?

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by dw861 on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:38AM

    by dw861 (1561) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:38AM (#827225) Journal

    Did I read this correctly?

    How will Norway pay for its social safety network without oil revenues?

    Simple. It is called the Statens pensjonsfond Utland, SPU.
    https://www.nbim.no/ [www.nbim.no]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway [wikipedia.org]

    Over the years, by law a percentage of Oil revenues were held in reserve and invested, and that core capital was never to be touched. Think about that. By 2019 the fund now has over $1 trillion dollars of assets.

    At this point the Norwegian govt owns 1.4% of every single publicly traded company on the planet. They also own real estate and other fixed assets. This has spread risk away from being continually dependent on oil.

    They don't need to drill for oil anymore. At this point they can forget about fossil fuels. The fund dividends can pay for all those expensive social programs. As of last year, they had almost $200k for every single citizen.

    A parallel story is that the fund is now divesting of pure fossil fuel exploration and extraction companies.

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