Statoil ASA’s investment cuts in response to the crude-price rout have sent shock waves through Norway’s oil industry, but it’s the company’s international operations that are paying the bigger price.
As painful as the company’s billions of dollars of cuts are for Norway, where it operates more than 70 percent of production, they’ve actually raised the share of total investments that Statoil makes in its home country. At the same time, an international expansion that’s defined the company for the past decade is slowing.
Three years ago, Brent oil traded at more than $115 a barrel and Statoil counted on international projects to increase production — allocating only about 40 percent of average annual investments of $21 billion to Norway through 2016. Last week, as the company reduced planned spending for this year to $13 billion from a $20 billion peak in 2014, it said it would be putting 55 percent of its capital into Norwegian projects over the next two years.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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