Most people imagine that mature fields like the North Sea are tapped out, a husk with nothing left to offer. Nonsense. What we’ve drained in the last century and a half was merely the cream—the top drop of oil and gas. The easy pickings. Reservoirs that practically threw hydrocarbons into our laps: clean flows, little processing, no heroic measures required. Those fields, the unicorns, make up maybe ten percent of the whole.
The rest? The less obliging ninety percent—the stuff harder to find, coax, refine, or bully into flowing—still lies beneath us, barely touched. And there’s a great deal of it. Enough to keep the world addicted long after the funeral sermons of “peak oil” have faded.Even the sanctimonious Norwegians, perched atop their sovereign wealth pile, will discover that virtue signaling carries a price—and that price is denominated in crude. Everyone needs money, and the Earth, obliging as ever, still has plenty to sell.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/08/15/norway-restarts-north-sea-drilling/