Norwegian oil production peaked in 2000 to 2001; gas production may be peaking about now. Oil hit a low in 2013 and then recovered towards a new local peak, probably concurrent with the gas.
drilling and development
The most surprising thing I find with their industry is that the drop in oil price made almost no difference the drilling activity shown here (all data here and below taken from the NPD – Norwegian Petroleum Directorate – which provides more data than just about any other such organisation).
The chart shows numbers of wells drilled, as stacked bars, and number of operating rigs (unstacked) against the left hand axis, other curves are ratios of total against the right axis. There was a high level of drilling activity in 2013 and 2014 which then actually increased in 2015 and was still high in 2016, although exploration well numbers look to be decreasing now. This may be just a consequence of the momentum built up in the high price years, or because of the influence of Norwegian regulatory regime (which has always sought to smooth out development activity, though less so recently with new Conservative governments), or a move to new frontiers in the Norwegian and Barents Seas (the background area chart shows proportion of wells in each sea). The development wells marked N/A (information not available) are probably mostly oil judging by the fields being drilled, the non-production wells are mostly injection with a few for observation and disposal. The number of rigs and proportion of dry wells have remained pretty steady, as has the proportion of subsea wells.
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