Norway

Our new ambition for the NCS is this: transforming the NCS for sustainable value creation for many decades. There are still substantial remaining oil and gas resources on the NCS. Some of these resources are near existing infrastructure, while other resources are difficult to find or located in smaller deposits requiring further technology development to become profitable.

Active exploration on the NCS is vital to succeed in revitalising the continental shelf. We are making two important moves: We have developed a strategy for more gas exploration. We will also test new ideas in some prospects every year. The likelihood of discovery in these wells will be lower than in other targets, but we see it as necessary to regularly test a few of what we call “game changing wells” in order to explore the NCS to its full potential.

Over the coming decades Equinor plans to drill up to 3000 production and exploration wells. This is almost as many wells as the company has drilled since it was established 50 years ago. This is an important measure to extract more profitable barrels from the fields we operate. We aim to achieve an average recovery rate of 60 and 85 percent respectively on our oil and gas fields.

The NCS still holds a lot of potential, but securing value creation and thousands of jobs for the decades to come is not an easy task. The changes needed will be bigger than ever before and are necessary as we continue to develop as a broad energy company.