Our onshore plants: getting energy to end users

The plants have differing purposes and functions, including purification and refining, processing, storage, shipping and distribution. This enables us to convert the well streams from offshore oil and gas fields into hydrocarbon products that can be sold on the market.

All our onshore plants are undertaking projects and energy efficiency measures aiming at reducing climate emissions. A broad range of solutions are under development, within energy management, electrification, new value chains and low carbon products.

To ensure that our projects are commercially viable we must make strategic choices and enter into strategic partnerships, ensuring synergies between existing assets and infrastructure, financing models and industrial collaboration.

Effective energy management
The objective of energy management is to optimise the energy usage at our onshore facilities so as to minimise greenhouse emissions. Efficiency measures in operation, maintenance and modifications can save costs, increase revenues, and reduce our climate footprint.

Our Norwegian onshore plants have set a ceiling of 1.7 million tons of CO₂ greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (scope 1), which is a 50% reduction from these facilities’ 2005 levels. In 2023 our onshore facilities implemented energy efficiency measures leading to reductions emissions of more than 39,000 tonnes per year. S

In addition to daily efficiency measures, some large projects will be able to make significant contributions to our Net Zero ambition for 2050.

Equinor operates six onshore plants in Norway either as an operator or as a technical service provider with Gassco as operator. The onshore facilities are tasked with converting crude oil and natural gas into products such as petrol, diesel, heating oil and methanol.

The ripple effects from these land plants are significant both locally and nationally. There are significant deliveries to these facilities with major ripple effects in the form of jobs across the country. 90 percent of the deliveries of 11.4 billion were from Norwegian companies, which demonstrates the capacity, competence and competitiveness of the Norwegian oil and gas cluster.

The largest deliveries to the land plants came from suppliers from South-West Norway. The largest deliveries from Western Norway were within the industries services for extraction, construction and construction, agency and wholesale trade, waste management and technical consultants.

Several onshore plants can be defined as cornerstone companies in the local community.

Of the total person-years associated with the operation of the land plants, 2,119 person-years were employed in Equinor, and 2,814 person-years were employed in the supplier industry through the work with the direct deliveries of goods and services to the operation. The remaining 4,122 person-years are related to sub-supplies in several stages, in addition to person-years related to consumption.

The increase in deliveries to the land plants in the last couple of years is mainly due to extraordinary deliveries in connection with a fire at Snøhvit/HLNG in autumn 2020.

In the same period, there has been strong price growth, which also explains the increase in the cost picture for the plants.

In total, Equinor's operations and exploration activities have very large employment effects. 63,000 person-years can be related to this activity, either through the fact that they are employed internally at Equinor (9,800), work in Norwegian supplier companies (20,900), or because of under-deliveries and consumption effects (32,300).

We continuously seek to improve our facilities. Our refinery at Mongstad also delivers biofuel from second generation feedstock, we have developed a method to calculate carbon footprint in our products amd our Tjeldbergodden plant is one of the world’s most energy-efficient methanol producers.