Norway – with great richness comes great responsibility

Allow me personal observations and facts from holidays in Norway – we have travelled more than 2200 km through Central and Southern regions of Norway:

– Beautiful sceneries and countryside: I can compare with the situation in 2000 (my first trip to Norway) and have to say, that Norwegians are doing a lot for nature preservation as well as for tourists incoming.

– Norway is a rich country – richness is coming from oil & gas exploration and production where Ekofisk offshore field discovered in 1969 started the Norwegian hunt for oil and gas and its sale to international markets. I recommend to visit Museum of Oil in Stavanger that is devoted to this topic.

-Nothing against to become rich from oil, however Norwegians realised, that with great richness comes also great responsibility.
Increased production of offshore oil&gas led to larger discharge of carbon dioxide, which totalled seven million tonnes in 1990. The government introduced a carbon tax in 1991 to persuade oil companies to reduce gas flaring on platforms and install more efficient gas turbines for offshore power generation. Emissions from oil industry were roughly 14 million tonnes in 2013, about 27% of Norway´s national total.

-Sleipner ranks Norway´s first CCS project. Since 1996, Statoil has been extracting carbon dioxide from the natural gas produced by North Sea field and injecting it in Utsira formation beneath the seabed. About a million tonnes are stored every year. Another example is Melkoya plant captures CO2 from the wellstream, a total of 650 000 tonnes of CO2 is piped back to Snohvit and injected into a separate formation every year.

-My impression from driving a car in Norway was that every 2nd inhabitant of Norway has an electric car and predominantely Tesla electric plug-in vehicles and thats including immigrants to this country. Of course, the official statistics do not show such a big share, however due to government incentives, 3 out of 4 newly bought cars in Norway are electric.

-CNG market is not well developed, just 20 CNG stations used mostly by public buses, so you have to be lucky to take a snap of an example.

Author: Petr Kalina with the use of information from Oil Museum in Stavanger