Norway Plans to Drill Oil and Gas in the Exclusion Zone

Drying rack for stockfish in the village of Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands. Source: iStock.com/JimmyLung

Norway is the world’s sole leader in offshore oil and gas production in the North Atlantic: in the North, Norwegian, and Barents Seas, and in the Arctic as a whole.

Total petroleum production (oil and gas combined) in Norway reached 239.2 million standard cubic meters of oil equivalents (Sm³ o.e.) in 2025.

By the end of 2025, there were 97 fields in production across the Norwegian Continental Shelf: 69 in the North Sea, 25 in the Norwegian Sea, and 3 in the Barents Sea.

The Johan Sverdrup field in the North Sea remains the anchor of high production, with a capacity of roughly 755,000 barrels per day.

Russia’s only Arctic oil field, Prirazlomnoye, reached the 30-million-ton cumulative production mark in the first quarter of 2025 since commercial operations began in 2013. This is a tiny fraction of Norwegian production in the northern seas.

Canada is also a bottleneck in North Atlantic oil production. Canada’s offshore shelf oil production centers are primarily on the Atlantic coast off Newfoundland and Labrador, contributing about 4% (roughly 0.2 million barrels per day) of the country’s total oil output.

For various reasons, not least environmental ones, the United States has not yet launched oil production on the hydrocarbon-rich shelf off the northern coast of Alaska.

As the largest offshore oil and gas producer, Norway is also the largest polluter of vulnerable marine ecosystems in the North Atlantic, where low water temperatures slow photodissociation, dissolution, and biodegradation.

The remaining oil floats on the surface, evaporates, forms stable emulsions, or settles to the bottom and pollutes shorelines. Even frequent small oil spills in Norway’s coastal waters have a long-term impact on marine ecosystems.

The largest oil spill occurred at the Norwegian Statfjord A platform on December 12, 2007, when approximately 27,500 barrels (4,000–4,400 cubic meters) of crude oil leaked into the North Sea. There have been many other smaller oil spills, which are not included in Norwegian statistics and are a major concern only for local residents, especially fishermen.

In 2001, the Norwegian government banned oil and gas production in the northern Norwegian Sea near the Lofoten Islands—the richest fishing ground in this part of the country’s Arctic waters.

Pressure from a schizophrenic European Union, with one half of its brain demanding a reduction in production and the use of fossil fuels to save the planet’s climate, and the other hysterically demanding that Norway quickly increase oil and, especially, gas supplies to the ailing economy of the Western Cape of Greater Eurasia, has forced the Norwegians to make a difficult choice, described in the publication below.

According to a competent Norwegian organization, Norway’s oil and gas production will decline by 60% by 2050 without the development of new offshore oil and gas fields, as happened previously in the UK’s North Sea.

BACKGROUND

• Oil and Gas Production Is Splitting Norway

The loud slamming of the EU boot on Norway’s door, as the publication below suggests, is forcing Norwegian politicians to forget the promises made 25 years ago and dust off the politically binding ban on hydrocarbon extraction, which threatens fisheries, especially cod, which in dried form is considered a powerful aphrodisiac in Southern Europe.

Older men in Italy, where dried cod, used to make an aphrodisiac soup, is almost deified, may forget about natural remedies for enhancing potency after a possible oil spill off the Lofoten Islands.

In this case, raising the birth rate in this dying country, where the total fertility rate by the end of 2025 fell to a record low of 1.14 children per woman, can be forgotten, as specialized pharmaceuticals are much more expensive than Norwegian cod.

One might wonder: why can’t the European Union purchase oil and gas at market prices on the global market, which will have ample oil after the Hormuz crisis ends, and LNG supply will significantly exceed global demand in a couple of years, thanks to large projects primarily in warmer climates.

Around 422 million metric tons of LNG were traded globally in 2025, marking an increase of roughly 21 million metric tons from the previous year. Some 300 billion cubic meters per year (roughly 220.5 million metric tons) of new LNG export capacity is projected to come online globally by 2030. (Approximately 121.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas were sold or marketed from the Norwegian continental shelf in 2025.)

What’s the point of increasing oil production, the consumption of which is rapidly reducing the development of a green economy globally, and gas, which will be abundant in just a few years in the vulnerable waters of the North Atlantic? To preserve the resource-based nature of the Norwegian economy and prevent its development as an innovation-driven economy?

Norway ranks only 20th in a 2025 ranking of the innovation performance of national economies. Its limited scientific workforce is focused primarily on research in oil and gas extraction.

It lags behind all of its Scandinavian neighbors and Finland in this indicator, with the exception of tiny Iceland with its handful of scientists and researchers.

The country essentially lacks a development strategy for the post-hydrocarbon era, the contours of which are already becoming apparent. In this regard, Norway lags even behind the oil monarchies of the Middle East, which in itself is humiliating and testifies to the low qualifications of its ruling class.