Oil Industry Withdraws From High Cost Areas
The oil industry is pulling back from some marginal areas of operation, slashing jobs and spending, and retrenching in the face of the ongoing slump in oil markets.
Signs of a shrinking footprint are beginning to pop up across the globe. Norway’s Statoil has let three of its exploration licenses expire in Greenland, an acknowledgement that exploring in frontier lands no longer makes sense with oil at $50 per barrel. Not too long ago, Greenland was hyped as an unexplored and pristine new oil region. The excitement was enough to fuel a bit of an independence movement within Greenland to pull away from Denmark.
Statoil also put an end to negotiations with Lundin Petroleum over building an oil terminal in Norway’s far north. Building an Arctic terminal would aid the development of several offshore oil and gas fields in the Barents Sea, where the companies each have made several discoveries.
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