The European energy crisis is an animal with two faces: sweat and tears in the EU, and lucrative profits in Norway.
The Scandinavian country, which became the bloc's first supplier of natural gas as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pocketed 528,000 million crowns (46,370 million euros) last year for its direct participation in oil and gas wells, according to reports. Petoro, the public firm that manages 36 of these deposits, reported this Tuesday.
This figure is five times higher than what Oslo used to get in a “normal” year – in the words of the company itself – and 54% higher than 2021, which was already a record.
Gas production – Norway's most abundant fuel and the one it sells the most to its southern neighbors – grew by just 7%, so most of the revenue increase has to do with record growth Of the prices.
Between January and August, the price of natural gas increased tenfold in the TTF market, the benchmark in the Twenty-seven.
"With these historically high values, Petoro has registered a cash flow five times greater than in a normal year," acknowledges its executive administrator, Kristin Fejerskov Kragseth, in the entity's annual report, peppered with several mentions of the drama of the war and its consequences.
The money obtained in this way, she emphasizes, will be transferred "in its entirety" to the Norwegian State: "These extraordinary profits will benefit the entire community."
“The long-term efforts on the Norwegian [gas] platform have allowed us to ensure that we can continue to bring large volumes of gas to Europe,” adds Kragseth.
"This increase has only been possible due to the increase in production in multiple fields."
The largest of these, Troll (in the North Sea), contains 60% of the gas reserves on the Norwegian continental shelf and has an expected useful life horizon of up to 2070. Total Norwegian gas production will remain at the level of 2022 for the next “four or five years,” according to the Petoro boss.
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Norway rubs its hands with the energy crisis: "There are times when it is not fun to earn money, and this is one of them"
The figures published this Tuesday by the manager of most of the country's fossil wells is just one more of those that support the boom in the Scandinavian nation on the back of gas and crude oil.
At the end of January, the Government calculated the tax revenue harvested in 2022 from the exploitation of its energy resources at 884,000 million crowns (77,670 million euros), almost three times more than a year earlier and 20% more than initially expected. .
This amount, which emanates directly from the income statement of the oil and gas companies, does not include the direct benefits from the exploitation of the wells.
"The main explanation is the high price of gas," said then the director general of the Norwegian tax administration, Nina Schanke Funnemark.
To these sums must be added the large dividends that Oslo will pocket for the dividends distributed by Equinor, the largest energy company in the country and in which public capital is around 67%.
Norway —whose sovereign wealth fund already manages more than a trillion euros in assets (stocks, bonds, buildings...)— already supplies almost a third of the natural gas consumed by the EU after the interruption of the Russian flow through the Nord gas pipeline Stream 1. Without your support, European energy survival in this crisis would have been little more than a pipe dream.
But his coffers also appreciate it.
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