The Norwegian Petroleum Fund

Abstract

By the late 1990s Norway had become the second largest oil exporter in the world, after Saudi Arabia. Its history as a major oil producer is nevertheless short. The beginnings were inauspicious. Over a few years in the 1960s the expectations with regard to oil production in the Norwegian part of the North Sea went from deep pessimism to optimism and euphoria. As recently as the late 1950s Norwegian geologists regarded the probability of finding oil underneath the North Sea as negligible, a view that only slowly started to be revised after the discovery of the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands in 1959.⁷⁶