How’s this for a good-news/bad-news headline. The world’s largest floating offshore wind farm seems like a great step forward in the world’s effort to ween itself off fossil fuels. Using that wind farm to extract more oil and gas seems counterintuitive.
But if we take a step back and think about Norway, it has always had a counterintuitive relationship with fossil fuels. It is a country built on fossil fuel wealth, that now leads the world in electric vehicle adoption (79% of new cars sold in 2022 in Norway were EVs). It is a country that has built such vast wealth from oil that its Government Sovereign Wealth Fund has $1.5 trillion (almost $300,000 for every citizen of Norway). But that fund appears to be slowing divesting fossil fuel holdings, having announced it will start by divesting upstream oil and gas.
So if any country was going to build renewable energy to extract more non-renewable energy resources, it would be Norway.
At the core of Norway’s contradiction is a continued reliance on the fossil fuel industry. The sector currently accounts for 14% of GDP and over 60% of the country’s exports. It is simply not ready to give it up.
One other thought we had when reading this article, the company building the offshore wind farm believes they will be able to provide about 35% of the energy needed to power the oil and gas extraction, and that 35% will reduce about 220,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year. Which is a real reminder of how energy intensive fossil fuel extraction is, and just makes you think about the emissions from the remaining 65%.
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