Introduction

Den Norske Stats Oljeselskap AS (“Statoil”) was founded in 1972 as the national oil company (NOC) of Norway. Along with Petrobras, Statoil is frequently considered to be among the state-controlled oil companies most similar to an international oil company (IOC) in governance, business strategy, and performance. Partially privately owned since 2001, its formal governance procedures are beyond reproach. The company is a technologically capable producer, having built up expertise in deep water and harsh environments from years of experience on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). Strategically, it hopes to leverage these home-grown engineering advantages to expand its international production, which now comes principally from Angola and Azerbaijan, with significant contributions from Algeria, Canada, the US Gulf of Mexico, and Venezuela as well.

Statoil’s development and performance have been intimately connected to its relationship with the Norwegian government over the years. Norway’s approach of separating policy, regulatory, and commercial functions in petroleum has inspired admiration and imitation as the canonical model of good bureaucratic design for a hydrocarbons sector. For example, Nigeria’s current oil and gas reform plan envisions reconstituted institutions whose functions and relationships would strikingly parallel those in Norway. Policymakers in Mexico have also looked to Norway’s separation-of-functions model as a possible blueprint for improving the country’s woeful performance in petroleum. At the same time, other countries have followed quite different paths and yet still performed well (Thurber et al. 2011). Angola, for example, has built a productive and fairly efficient petroleum sector with almost no formal separation of policy, regulatory, and commercial roles (see Chapter 19).