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StatoilHydro ‘meets’ northern neighbor Alaska Norwegian oil company considering Chukchi leases, brings common history of Arctic and offshore exploration and production Eric Lidji Petroleum News
If StatoilHydro follows through plans to bid in the upcoming Chukchi lease sale it would be the first foray into Alaska for the Norwegian oil company, but considering the history and experience of StatoilHydro, Alaska might not seem so foreign.
“Alaska is pretty much like Norway. So I feel like home,” Odd Instefjord, special advisor for international procurement and supplier relations for StatoilHydro, said at the Meet Alaska conference on Jan. 25 at the Egan Center in Anchorage.
The “world’s largest offshore subsea operator” has more than 3,700 miles of pipeline and projects in 40 countries, including deepwater work in the Gulf of Mexico, new interests in the Canadian oil sands and a long history in the Arctic waters of the North Sea.
But StatoilHydro still has one major omission from its portfolio.
“I can see that Alaska is not on the map yet,” Instefjord said. “So we consider, still, Alaska as one of the top priority items, I can assure you, but we are still not here.”
Instefjord, though, said that over “several visits,” StatoilHydro has been “investigating the possibility” of coming to Alaska.
Reports of plans for Alaska Its arrival could start within a week.
At the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway, Halvor Engebretsen, general manager of StatoilHydro’s Arctic division, confirmed reports that the company plans to bid for “several” Chukchi licenses during the U.S. Minerals Management Service lease sale scheduled for Feb. 6, according to a report from the online publication BarentsObserver.com.
As reported by Petroleum News in “The Explorers 2007,” StatoilHydro joined the Alaska Oil and Gas Association and the Resource Development Council for Alaska, and before the merger, Norsk Hydro USA hired former director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas Ken Boyd as a consultant in Alaska.
The history of the Norwegian oil industry mirrors that of the Alaska oil industry in many ways, beginning with a large North Sea discovery in the late 1960s, around the time the Atlantic Richfield Co. discovered Prudhoe Bay.
StatoilHydro merged last year StatoilHydro came about from the merger of Statoil and Norsk Hydro in October 2007, but the two companies separately date back to the beginning of the Norwegian oil industry in 1969.
Norsk Hydro began as a fertilizer company around the start of the 20th century, but moved into the oil industry with the discovery of the Ekofisk field in the late 1960s.
Statoil was formed as the Norwegian state oil company in 1972, just a few years before the discovery of the Statfjord field in the North Sea. The Norwegian government holds about 62.5 percent of the merged company.
“At the time, Norway was a poor country,” Instefjord said. “We didn’t have any experience at all in the hydrocarbon field. So we had to build it all from the bottom.”
Instefjord said Norway converted shipbuilding and processing industries into support industries for oil and gas work, and the universities began turning out graduates in specialized degrees.
Today, the Government Pension Fund of Norway, the Norwegian equivalent of the Alaska Permanent Fund, is worth around $350 billion.
“I don’t think it would have been possible for this company to be here today unless we had a strong cooperation with the industry as a whole. We are very dependent on the industry,” Instefjord said.
Even though StatoilHydro employs around 31,000 people around the world, Instefjord estimated 90 percent of StatoilHydro’s investments are handled through contractors.
“That means that we can train our own people, but unless we make sure that the industry trains their people and are performing their work at top class, we will not have the best results,” he said.
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