Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre has been vigorously touring the continent, telling everybody who wants to listen that Norway’s Arctic oil and gas are crucial for Europe’s energy security.
“We increased our gas exports to the EU when the war in Ukraine broke out, and all of that increase came from the Arctic,” he told the Financial Times earlier this month, in the context of another energy crisis, this time caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.
That same week, he met the commissioner for international partnerships, Josef Síkela, and the EU’s special adviser for the Arctic, Jyrki Katainen, to offer them “the Norwegian perspective on the region,” said people familiar with his agenda.
Norway’s pitch is that its oil and gas are cleaner and more secure than supplies from the US or the Middle East.
But for Europe to really benefit, Norway’s government insists, it first needs to drop its moratorium on new Arctic oil and gas projects, set out in the EU’s 2021 Arctic strategy, which is up for review later this year.
