Norway’s Oil and Gas Industry Faces a Major Decline Without New Discoveries

Résumé détaillé

Norway faces a projected oil and gas production shortfall of 1.9 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2040 as smaller offshore discoveries fail to replace declining output from major fields.

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For more than half a century, Norway’s oil and gas production has been underpinned by a handful of very large discoveries, the last of which, Wisting in the Barents Sea, was made more than a decade ago. Since then, exploration on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) has increasingly focused on smaller finds close to existing infrastructure, allowing operators to bring new volumes online faster and at lower cost. While this approach has helped sustain production in the near term, it will not be enough to arrest the NCS’s projected decline through to 2040.

The outlook could deteriorate further if exploration activity does not increase. If exploration volumes over the next decade remain at the same level as the previous ten years, the production gap in 2040 would reach 2.2 million boepd. Halving the time taken to bring discoveries into production under the same exploration assumptions would reduce this to 2.1 million boepd, demonstrating that faster development alone will have a limited impact on the long-term outlook. Even doubling exploration volumes from the previous decade's level, while halving development timelines, would leave a shortfall of 1.4 million boepd.

The danger for Norway is that it becomes increasingly efficient at finding smaller volumes while losing the ability to replace the large fields that underpin its production base. If this continues, the country faces not only a steep decline in oil and gas output, but also a shrinking pipeline of major projects needed to sustain activity across the NCS.

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