Norway’s Arctic Oil Ambitions Threatened by Slump in Oil - Businessweek
▻http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-10-23/norway-s-arctic-oil-ambitions-threatened-by-slump-in-oil
Norway’s push to exploit Arctic waters for oil, already denounced by environmentalists, is now under threat from the slump in crude prices.
The Arctic Barents Sea off northern Norway is reckoned to contain 40 percent of the country’s undiscovered resources and seen as key to extending oil output as aging North Sea fields decline. But operating there is expensive, and even before the recent plunge in prices, state-controlled Statoil ASA (STL)’s key project in the area had been delayed twice.
“The premises for what we’re discussing could be gone because of a weakening market,” Terje Aasland, a lawmaker from the opposition Labor Party, said during a debate on Arctic oil in Oslo yesterday. “What we believed a few months ago, we don’t believe today.”
