The Prime Minister's opening address at Oslo Energy Forum

As delivered (transcript from the video recording)

Creating Action for Transformational Change – business and political views

Madam President (of Tanzania) – welcome to Norway. It is good to see you here, Your Royal Highness (of Norway), dear friends,

Introduction

I would just like to start with a personal note that being Prime Minister – and also with my Foreign Minister, Espen (Barth Eide) here, who has also been Climate Minister – we feel we live in this transitional change every day. And this is not just language, it is real. It is on the Government's agenda. It is about where we travel. Our Minister of Development is here – she is seeing it from her perspective, how development is influenced by this transformation. So, just let me state this, because on our way up here you meet people who exercise their democratic rights, protesting. But I tell them, believe me, we are in the midst of that.

I would like to salute Oslo Energy Forum for setting agendas that reflect this transition. This forum has gone on for years. And I think, Sven (Mollekleiv), if you take the agendas and the programs and you lay them out, you will see part of that transition.

I welcome Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry, tirelessly travelling on this route with us. And all of you, members of businesses.

And I would just like to state before I share a Norwegian perspective, as Anders Opedal said, this is not conflict-free. There will be very tough choices. And there is no harmonious way to change an energy system by political will. It will require a lot of courage and it will require the ability to stay the course, even though it is complex.

The backdrop is, of course, as we saw on the screen, dramatic geopolitics.

I think we should not underestimate the demographic changes happening in the world, and inside each society as well.

Digitalization, of course, which is transforming so much.

And then I would add, as we discuss climate, the emergence of understanding nature. Having signed now a treaty that will put biodiversity on the same side, same level as safeguarding climate. We have to see the two in combination. It is not making it easier, but it is making it more complete.

I too came out of COP with a sense of optimism. The advantage of having something which has low expectations is that you may over-fulfil expectations. And there are people here in this room I know who contributed to making that a success. And I thank them.

I think this is a new risk reality, but also an opportunity reality. We have agreed to do the fossil fuel transition. We are moving out of fossil fuels. We have agreed to triple renewables and to double energy efficiency. And being at the COP, you had the sense that this is not only language. It is a real determination. And we have agreed to continue to work with the COP presidency, with the UAE, for the coming months leading up to COP29. And we will meet in two days in Munich with the President of COP, again to set new agendas and work with him on the way ahead.

Part of the optimistic side, DNV is saying it is going to be terribly hard to reach – and I appreciate, it is complex. Rystad Energy, on the other side, say that there are technological surprises, that renewables are increasingly outperforming fossil fuels, 50 percent more in 2023 than the year before. And that we are perhaps within the 1.6 to 1.9 degrees, as they see it now. But with the technological push and the new policies required, I would say that we still can raise the hand and say let us keep the 1.5 alive.

Then, what does this mean for Norway? Let me just give you, in my five remaining minutes, four observations:

Safe provider of gas to Europe

We are transitioning out of oil and gas. That is the big story. And we are not an oil nation, we are an energy nation. We are not living in ‘the old age’, we are living in the energy age. We started with the hydro water in the late 19th century, then transitioned – oil, gas, and we now have attention focused on solar, wind, offshore wind, land wind, and new technologies.

We will continue to be a safe provider of gas to Europe. Hadn't we been, Europe would have been in a deep crisis. Hadn't there been LNG from Melkøya, Germany would not have been able to fill up its stocks of gas, and you would have had geopolitical risk increasing in Europe.

There will still be residual demand for oil products in the decades to come. Obviously, after 2030, Equinor's figures and our figures show that we are declining. But we will not make a shift closing one door, then opening another one. There is a transition.

So, that is my first point. We will remain a stable provider, fulfilling our agreements. And the recent agreement between Equinor and German partners of safe delivery of gas for the coming years, I believe is absolutely essential to succeed in Germany's transition.

Renewables

Second observation, we are making a major effort on renewables.

It is not easy. There are discussions about land. We need more renewable power, more grid, more efficiency at the same time. But Norway has quite an amount of land compared to the number of people living around. So, it should be possible in a democracy like ours to find solutions to make and realize that potential of wind onshore, but not least offshore wind.

And you need to stand some tough tests because when so many want to do the same thing at the same time, you get bottlenecks in the value chains of offshore wind.

But if you look around the world and all the people living close to the shores, it is unbelievable to even imagine that the world will be able to face these challenges without realizing that potential.

So, it will happen. There will be bumps in the road, but it needs to be governments and companies that can do wise ‘skiing’ over those bumps. And we can. So, that is my second observation. We are really focused on this and we will deliver.

There will be a North Sea network of renewable energy through ocean wind. And our ambition of realizing 30 gigawatts by 2040 stands, although – you know – starting all of this is complex, but we are putting a lot of efforts into succeeding.

Third observation is that there is no credible 1.5/1.6 scenario without the ability of capturing CO2 and storing it safely.

Carbon capture and storage

There is no scientist from natural sciences, political sciences, whatever sciences that can point to 2030 or 2050 with any sense of realism if we cannot succeed on that technology. And we know how to do that in Norway. We have done it for some decades.

I think one of the major transformations I observed politically as Prime Minister in two and a half years, is how Europe has come around. Having combated CCS as something dangerous, it would leak, it would not be solid; now it is written into the EU strategy. They want an internal market for this.

And Norway has a Green Alliance with the European Union, where carbon capture and storage is key among the objectives. Germany, that really fought this technology, has now turned 180 degrees and we cooperate on it very closely.

Next year there will be a complete value chain open in Norway that can receive CO2 by ships and we can have it safely deposited 3,000 meters under the seabed. My government has procedures for granting licenses for drilling, but now we grant licenses for drilling storage capacity. The Norwegian part of the European continental shelf can probably take decades of Europe's CO2 in storage. So that is a major change, which I think is positive.

Climate finance

Fourthly, we are doubling our climate finance, supporting countries in accordance with the Paris Agreement, like yours, Madam President, who is making the transition.

That was a major breakthrough of the first day of the COP and I salute the President for strategically planning the conference so that that happened on the first day. I salute my Foreign Minister for having contributed to that and John Kerry and others. And it happened and I think it is a major boost for confidence in the system.

Now we have to do everything we can to support countries that make critical choices. Should we go down the fossil road or should we make the choice, which is obviously the future, the renewable road? Should we build 50 more coal-fired power plants or should we realize the potential in wind, sun and new technologies?

So, I have spent time in addition to my PM job to co-chair the Global Leadership Council of GEAPP (the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet) that is mobilizing resources for storage capacity of renewable energy, such as large batteries.

There is a battery premium, there is a green premium for emerging economies, making batteries more expensive out there in Asia than it is in our part of the world. So, we have to get up that scale. Last year, Bill Gates reminded us that you need to bring it to scale, and the only thing that matters at the end of the day is our ability to count tons. We have to count tons and get the tons down.

So, this is the way we work and I will take this opportunity then to move on to the next part of this session.

Before I introduce the President of Tanzania, who is our guest in Norway, I would like to say that one example of how we think in Norway is that we will reach our 2030 and 2050 targets. – That will not matter much on the big global scale of climate targets. But the way we reach our targets may matter. So if we succeed floating offshore wind, it may have impact far beyond Norway. When we have succeeded carbon capture and storage, it may have major impact far beyond Norway. If we can do LNG and if we can do our offshore activity with 50 percent reduction of emissions, it is technology that can have an impact far beyond.

Clean cooking

And then we should support initiatives which are coming up and that are really making a difference. One such initiative taken by Fatih Birol of the IEA in Paris is the Clean Cooking Initiative. And this is something I came about 20 years ago when I worked with the WHO, the World Health Organization.

Indoor air pollution is the biggest health threat to people around the world, especially women in developing countries. Because as they do their cooking and they bend over the cooking store and they have a kid on their back, their lungs are polluted by the fuel which is burned in those systems. We can do something about that. And together with the President and the Director of IEA, we are now supporting a major initiative to get businesses around to support new clean cooking technology, which is not high-tech, friends. It is low-tech. And therefore we can succeed.

With these words, I am very happy to introduce my partner in this initiative, our guest in Norway, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, the very respected President of Tanzania. Please – welcome.

 

• More information on the conference: Oslo Forum – energy transition in the new risk reality