Norway Oil Bosses Insist End Isn't Nigh After $35 Billion Shock

Can Norway dump $35 billion in oil and gas investments, and simultaneously convince that same industry to throw money into the country’s own fossil-fuel future?

After the initial shock of learning that Norway’s $1 trillion wealth fund wants nothing to do with it, the petroleum industry says both are in fact possible.

But the mood is shifting. While the fund said its proposal is about spreading risk and doesn’t imply a negative outlook on the oil industry, the plan reverberated as a nod from western Europe’s biggest oil producer to the uncertain future facing oil.

Such doubts are the last thing the country’s offshore industry needs. It’s just suffered through a three-year slump, and is struggling with public opinion as it faces an historic lawsuit to stop its expansion in the Arctic. After more than 40 years of pumping oil, Norway is also in need of new investments to replenish reserves just as many of the big global oil companies are looking for the exit.

Read more about big oil getting out of Norway

“This is just one of several negative news stories that are piling up -- that’s probably what made me shake my head at the beginning,” Frode Alfheim, the head of Industry Energy, Norway’s biggest oil union, said in a phone interview on Friday. “But I both hope and believe that this isn’t something that will impair international investors’ desire to invest on the Norwegian shelf.”