Supermajors are shunning Arctic oil exploration in Norway, or at least that’s the overwhelming feeling after the last licensing round conducted by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate in early December. Eleven companies applied for 102 blocks or parts of blocks, of which almost all were in the Barents Sea. The only supermajor in the crowd was Shell. What happened? More than half of Norway’s untapped oil and gas reserves are located in the Barents Sea. That’s beyond the Arctic Circle—an area that contains an estimated 90 billion barrels of crude and 1,669 trillion cu ft of natural gas in total. Norway’s share is more than 9 billion barrels of undiscovered oil. This likely would have sounded irresistible five years ago, with Big Oil always on the hunt for large-scale projects, armed with the means to afford investing in them. No more. Now everyone—up to and including the likes of Exxon, […]