From apprentice to manager. 50 years in the industry

Dag Thygesen represents a large piece of Norwegian industrial history – in person. For 50 years, he has worked at Equinor and in companies that have become part of Equinor.

“I remember how special it was to enter such a large industrial area. Everything was so new when we first came here, and the people here had years of experience in what was about to be done,” Dag Thygesen says.

He remembers opening the gate to the operating facility at Herøya in Porsgrunn for the first time on 7 August 1972. Hydro had about 5,000 employees here at the time, and it was an enormous workplace. Dag was a student at Hydro's business school. He had chosen a different direction from his friends – instead of applying to upper secondary school, he had become an apprentice in laboratory science.

50 years later, with 50 years of industry experience, he still does not regret his choice. Now his workplace is part of Equinor after the merger with Hydro's oil division.

Manual to automated

Dag has been at the centre of the development of what became Norway's most important industry and an essential part of how we finance our welfare state. He has witnessed how Equinor and the industry have developed over five decades. He has been part of the entire industrial journey from a pure oil and gas company to a broad energy company. Today, he is the manager of the operating facility in Porsgrunn.

A world-class test facility

He has been at the plant for almost all of the fifty years, except for a year and a half during the 1980s, when he, like so many others at the time, travelled out into the North Sea.

Dag had received an offer to run the laboratory on the Brage platform, which he thought seemed exciting. But with small children at home and a spouse who also worked a lot, it became difficult, and Thygesen chose to return to Porsgrunn again.

“What I am most proud of throughout all these years is that we have never compromised on safety to achieve anything. The people here have always come first. Everything else has been unacceptable,” says Thygesen.

He has been involved in building a world-class test facility, and over a billion NOK has been invested. It has been used to test separation and technical solutions for transporting various combinations of oil, gas and water in the same pipe – so-called multiphase transport.

That is why one of the test rigs is called “Flerfaseriggen” – the multiphase rig. In many ways, it is the “heart” of Equinor’s operations in Porsgrunn.