Norway's Barents Undiscovered Resources “Double”: NPD

The undiscovered oil and gas resources in the Barents Sea are twice as large as previously assumed, according to new calculations from Norway’s upstream regulator.

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) said April 25 it has recently mapped the eastern part of the northern Barents Sea – an area of about 170,000km², so 10,000km² larger than the Norwegian part of the North Sea.

A large part of this is in a previously disputed area, and most of the new information has been collected after the demarcation line agreement with Russia entered into force in the summer of 2011 – bringing the area now described entirely under Norway’s control. But the area described (see map below)  is remote and hostile, being southeast of the Svalbard archipelago, much further north than southern Barents Sea fields such as Snohvit gas/condensate and the recently-suspended Goliat oil fields that are themselves far inside the Arctic Circle.

NPD said that the share of undiscovered resources in the Norwegian Barents Sea has thus been increased from 50% to nearly 65% of the total undiscovered resources on the Norwegian shelf. The resources in the new area are estimated at 1.4 bn m³ of oil equivalents (8.8bn boe) – equivalent to 14 Johan Castberg oil fields, and more than five times the Snohvit field.

The expected total resources are about the same in the mapped part of the northern Barents Sea as in the southern Barents Sea, but the northern part is only half the size of the southern part. “This means that the mapped area in the north has about twice the resource potential per square kilometre as the southern Barents Sea,” says NPD director general Bente Nyland.

Map source: Norwegian Petroleum Directorate

Mark Smedley