Podcast

Can Norway’s State Oil Company Be A Climate Champion?

Norway is pursuing a future rich in fossil energy and climate solutions. Can its oil company, Equinor, reconcile these priorities and continue to reliably finance the country’s expansive social welfare system? Equinor’s clean energy chief weighs in.

Much has been made of Norway’s efforts to address climate change.  The country has set the goal of going carbon neutral by the middle of the century, and generates nearly all of its electricity from hydropower. Norway’s ambitious environmental policies have even transformed the country’s car market, where EVs now account for half of new car sales.

Yet the country remains economically dependent on its fossil fuel industry, which provides key revenue for the government and its generous social welfare programs.

Much of Norway’s fossil fuel wealth comes from a single company, state-controlled Equinor, which has produced oil and gas from North Sea wells for half a century and is now diversifying beyond fossil fuels. Equinor opened the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm in 2017, and is developing a carbon capture and storage business.

Stephen Bull, Equinor’s senior vice president for Wind and Low Carbon Development, discusses Equinor’s efforts beyond fossil fuels and how the Norwegian government, which is environmentally progressive yet dependent on oil wealth, is driving the company. He also talks about the inherent conflict of interest when a fossil fuel company pursues non-fossil energy alternatives.

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m Andy Stone. Much has been made of Norway’s efforts to address climate change. The country has set the goal of going carbon neutral by the middle of the century and generates nearly all of its electricity from hydropower. Norway’s ambitious environmental policies have even transformed the country’s car market, where EVs now account for half of new car sales. Yet the country remains economically dependent on its fossil fuel industry, which provides key funding for the government and its generous social welfare programs.

Much of Norway’s fossil fuel wealth comes from a single company, Equinor, which has produced oil and gas from North Sea wells for half a century and is majority owned by the Norwegian government. Like a number of oil and gas companies, Equinor is now diversifying beyond fossil fuels. The company opened the first commercial floating offshore wind farm in 2017 and is developing a carbon capture and storage business.

On today’s podcast, we’ll look at Equinor’s efforts beyond fossil fuels, and how the policies of the Norwegian government, which is environmentally progressive, yet dependent on oil wealth, are driving the company. Today’s guest is Stephen Bull, Senior Vice President for Wind and Low Carbon Development at Equinor. Stephen is also chairman of Renewable U.K., a renewable energy trade association. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen Bull: Thanks, Andy, great to be here.

Stone: What brings you to Philadelphia from Europe today.

Bull: So I’m on a little bit of offshore wind road trip at the moment. I kicked off in D.C. yesterday to meet with Department of Interior and some folks up on the hill to understand more about what’s going on offshore wind new developments in offshore wind in the U.S. And pop into Philadelphia, my son studies at Penn. So, it’s great to catch up with him, and also to meet up with the faculty of the Kleinman Center. And then I’m on my way to Stamford, Connecticut, to meet the team who work with offshore wind in the U.S. for us. And to Boston, Massachusetts to start working on stakeholder work for our new lease.

Stone: So tell us a little bit more about your role with Equinor.

Bull: So the Senior Vice President role that I have is actually to do with the development of offshore wind projects. So, if I just put this into a context, it takes five years to develop an offshore wind project and that goes from accessing a particular lease. And, actually, what we have to do is the environmental impact assessment work, we do the full met ocean studies, we do four core geotech geophysical, and then we actually start building the offshore wind farm itself. So, I do all that part of it with a great team, based out of U.S., London, Norway, we’re kind of pretty international now. And also have carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, which is part of my portfolio as well.

Stone: So can you tell us a little bit more about Equinor’s history, and its historic main line of business?

Bull: So, as you mentioned, Equinor has been around for nearly 50 years. We started out as the Norwegian government’s oil and gas company, Norway’s developments with oil and gas started in the late 1960s, with U.S. companies coming in the North Sea looking for new developments. And Norway actually wanted to have a national champion within this sector.

Over time, we’ve kind of transformed the company in many respects, we are now 67%, owned by the Norwegian state. So, we’re free float on the New York and the Oslo Stock Exchange. We’ve been changing a lot over time as well. So we even starting off as Statoil, we became StatoilHydro for a while when we had a merger with Norsk Hydro, and now we become Equinor, more to develop and actually exemplify our strategy with an energy transition.

Stone: So you said that Equinor is 67% owned by the Norwegian government. So obviously, the Norwegian government has a lot of say in how the company is run in its direction. Could you tell us a little bit, for the moment, about Norway’s major climate policies in particularly as they impact the oil and gas business?

Bull: As you mentioned, only gas is a pretty cornerstone industry in Norway, it’s a really important part of actually sort of supplying the welfare state itself. But also, it’s the source of a lot of high-tech industry for the offshore sector, particularly oil and gas, but also to do with shipping, marine transportation, you know. Norway is a small open economy, which is highly reliant on actually oil and gas, aluminum, lumber, fishing, etc. what’s kind of interesting about it is Norway’s policy in at its best, is often about coexistence of industries.

So, for oil and gas to develop in a country, which is highly reliant on fishing is really important part for us as well. So that’s something that we see is sort of something we take with us globally as a company, when it comes to actually the role of oil and gas noise. You know, clearly a progressive country when it comes to sustainability. It’s always been supported of the UN sustainability goals. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the prime minister, was one of the key architects of sustainability within the UN.

So, the tradeoff of the conundrum between basically developing oil and gas business, plus an outlook for stainless sustainability is really important part of the country itself. So again, how we produce oil and gas in Norway is extremely important for the country. So, we have some of the lowest CO2 emissions from our oil and gas platforms in the world. Plus, we have a very large CO2 tax for offshore as well. So, it’s over 50 euros a tonne of CO2. And that kind of derives a lot of energy efficiency and CO2 storage solutions for Norway as well.

Stone: You said that offshore the carbon emissions from the offshore activities are quite low. What exactly is the state requiring what is Equinor doing to lower those emissions?

Bull: So, part of our strategy is to really have a low carbon advantage when it comes to oil and gas. Now to reduce oil and gas, you produce CO2, there’s no doubt about it. So, on a global level, you can see we can measure these things in terms of kilograms of barrel oil equivalent. So, if you think the average industry, CO2 emissions per barrel is about 17 kilograms per barrel oil equivalent. In Norway, in our total portfolio, we’re actually on eight kilograms. So, this low carbon advantage producing oil and gas in a sustainable manner is really important for us. So that’s part of our own climate housekeeping.

Stone: What specific technologies are using the keep that those emissions down?

Bull: So as that suite of technologies that we would use? I mean, energy efficiency obviously goes without saying, having the best turbines that we can use on our platforms is really important. And your fish turbines…

Stone: Turbines on the oil and gas platforms?

Bull: That’s right, yeah. So, one of the biggest parts of using power on an oil and gas platform is you actually use natural gas to produce power. Can we offset that with our more energy efficient turbines? There’s one thing. Can we for example, take electricity from shore. So, can we take that in and actually power oil and gas production with power from shore. And Norway’s energy is, essentially, mostly produced from hydroelectricity. So, it has the green energy towards oil and gas. The other one is actually can we develop offshore wind, for example, floating offshore wind concepts to reduce the CO2 impact? Finally, CCS, carbon capture and storage as well.

Stone: So those turbines, I think my head jumped to wind turbines when you said that. So, you are using wind turbines in conjunction with your offshore oil and gas operations as well, is that correct?

Bull: We’re planning that. So, we’re at the level at the moment, we have a project, which we call Hywind Tampen. Tampen is the name of an oil and gas producing region in on the offshore in the Norwegian continental shelf in the North Sea. And we’re looking into a concept where we can have 11 turbines, which will produce about 88 megawatts of power, floating turbines. It’s a 200 meter water depth out there, where we produce actually clean green power for oil and gas operations.

And what we can do with that one is we can actually reduce the CO2 emissions from our gas, we can save on nitrous oxide as well. And also, we can actually have more gas back into our portfolio. So, it’s much more efficient way, a better way, of actually greening it. And a key thing for Norway, again, is touching, reduce CO2 emissions offshore, it’s a really sort of clear goal. So we come with different solutions like offshore wind turbines, power from shore, CCS, you know, we can help solve those issues.

Stone: So Equinor built the first commercial floating wind project off of the coast of Scotland, it’s called Hywind and it started operations in 2017. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Bull: So maybe for the listeners, let’s differentiate between offshore wind here. So, there are two types of technology when offshore wind one is a bottom fixed installation, and we talk about foundations here. A bottom fixed installation means that you have basically a really large long tube called the monopole, you hammer it into the seabed, and you stick a turbine on top sounds easier than it’s done.

The other thing is you can use jacket foundations as well. And you essentially, you know, screw them into the bottom of the seabed in water depths of over 50 to 60 meters, then this basically is uneconomic, you need just too much steel, and you just can’t really develop those kind of foundations. So, you need floating ideas here. Now, the floating offshore wind is really based on a spa technology, or a semi-submersible is exactly the same technology from oil and gas. So, our oil and gas people, our engineers, will actually come with a concept where we were using, for example, a spa for another gas platform, and we just scale it down towards a wind turbine. Again, we use this with catenary chains. It’s actually suction anchors on the seabed, all oil and gas technology from the sea down and then we put turbines on top of it. So, it’s the kind of perfect marriage of renewables plus oil and gas.

Stone: So it’s the same technologies of deep water, oil and gas platform, right?

Bull: Yeah, it is. Yeah, definitely. And again, this is tested for catastrophic conditions. And when it comes to integrity for operations, I mean, let’s face it, we produce oil and gas and in some of the harshest places in the world. We have to deal with corrosion. We have to deal with, you know, wind, waves, hurricanes, you name it. All of that needs to be tested technology for oil and gas and we use that and to transfer it across into renewables as well.

Stone: What’s the specific appeal of the floating wind.

Bull: So 80% of the world’s best wind resources are in water depths of over 100 meters. So, this really means that to capture the best work best conditions we can, the best wind resources, we need to go floating. So, it’s really for countries with more sort of topographic conditions where, you know, basically the shelf starts to drop off pretty quickly. California is an example of this, or the whole of the seaboard from California, all the way up to Washington, Japan, South Korea, Scotland, Norway, Argentina, lots of areas here where you can see actually, where there’s a lot of great wind resources, but the conditions are very deep. So floating wind technology is something that can actually take on a new wave of renewables.

Stone: How did the economics compare the floating versus the stuck in the ground versus the onshore?

Bull: So the, what do you find here within renewables is about deployment. So, it’s kind of the property cliche, you know, sort of location, location, location, is the same with renewables deployment, deployment, deployment. And the deployment you’ve seen, for example, in solar, onshore wind, offshore wind bottom fixed, it’s been fantastic cost reduction over time. We’re not there floating yet. Currently, we just have 30 megawatts of in the water ourselves in our portfolio, we’re looking for this Hywind Tampen project to be at 88 megawatts.

But we really need to get to the gigawatt scale of actually, really sort of industrializing this concept. And I think we’re gonna get there at some point where we just got to get there now. And we can get that ride from bottom fixed installations, turbines are getting bigger, costs are coming down, the supply chain is more competitive. But we just need to actually take that and add it into this scalability and the deployment for floating

Stone: So that scalability will bring the profitability, if I understand correctly.

Bull: It will yeah, definitely. So, I think getting there is the key part first, and we can see this, particularly the smaller projects that we could try and develop off of Korea. We’re looking into some projects there with partners, Korean National Oil Company. We’re looking into developments in Japan, in addition, and then we sort of got real keen eyes on California for prospects as well.

Stone: So you are the chair of Renewable U.K., which again, is the trade association for renewable energy in the United Kingdom. How challenging was it politically to get this project off of Scotland started in the U.K.?

Bull: So I think what’s been great about the Scottish project is that we’ve had really, really strong support from the U.K. government, and particularly from Scottish Government, as well. So, all the way down to the local level of Aberdeen District Council. So, it’s been a sort of labor of love internally in our company. And we when we had the first ever floating offshore turbine in 2009. We’ve been testing that technology for quite a long time now, to actually come with a full, actually an array as we call it, a wind farm has been fantastic news for us. So this is a flagship for both, you know, the U.K., and also its flagship for us as a company as well.

Stone: Tell us about Empire Wind in New York off of Long Island. That is a project, there have been a lot of new offshore leases off of the East Coast, the United States over the last year. Equinor won one of those leases. Now where does that project stand in terms of development?

Bull: So, we’re at a really exciting stage for Empire Wind. I’ll back it up a little bit first. Empire Wind is offshore wind leases off the coast of Long Island. We acquired this in December 2016 from BOEM Bureau of Ocean Energy Management who deal with all the offshore wind leases. It’s about 80,000 acres in size. It’s 20 miles off the coast of, I mentioned, Long Island, and is about between 65-130 feet deep.

The total area here can take up to about 2000 megawatts of clean power straight into New York. And we’ve seen that New York’s got extremely ambitious targets renewable energy targets, particularly looking for nine gigawatts or 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind. So, the solicitation that New York has developed now it was on February 14th, has been the first time they’ve done this about 800 megawatts for the first solicitation. We’re in for the bid. There are several others in there as well. It’s a competitive process. But we’re really excited about this. And this would be the first step in trying to build a core hub around the U.S. northeast for us for offshore wind.

Stone: So you are looking to win the bid. And then there’s actually the project financing that will come after that. What’s the environment for project financing for offshore wind in the United States right now?

Bull: Our financing strategy ourselves is that we basically do everything off our balance sheet. So, it is a normal oil and gas way of doing it. We don’t need to project finance projects. We have a pretty big and $76 billion company, we’ve got a pretty big balance sheet to actually build off that one we find that’s the best approach. But we do look into other alternative financing. Sometimes partners need to finance this as well. But we come from a different kind of background and some other developers that are dependent on actually development project financing.

Stone: Let me ask you this, strategically for Equinor, is wind and renewables generally intended to be a complimentary business for the company or is it eventually seen as a replacement for fossil fuels over the longer term. Could it replace the revenue that comes from the fossil fuel business?

Bull: That’s a good question. Andy. It’s, kind of an existential question. We think you see it in many European oil and gas companies, you know, where are we going in the energy transition in the future. What we do see is that even in a two-degree scenario, or even a 1.5 degree scenario, there is still space for oil and gas, there will be in the future.

Defining carbon abatement strategies for oil and gas is going to be more and more important. Hence, we are pretty strong on using our carbon capture and storage concepts and also clean hydrogen as well. But the way we see really oil and gas and renewables, we don’t see it as either or, we see both and, and, as I mentioned, you know, we’re trying to integrate as much renewables and actually, you know, carbon efficiency into oil and gas business as much as possible. So actually, complementing themselves together, with the clear goal of reducing carbon emissions is a clear target for us.

We want, you know, our new energy solutions to be, you know, independent leg as it were within the company, you know, it needs to finance itself, it needs to sort of grow into something, something significant in the future. But we have to say, you know, this industry is like a supertanker, you can’t control alt delete your strategy overnight, you know, it does take time to turn. But we’re definitely on the turn in the company towards, you know, all the excitement, and actually the risk, but also the rewards of the energy transition.

Stone: Let’s talk about the carbon capture and storage business for a moment. So, you are using CCS to reduce the carbon footprint in in the North Sea. What specifically is being done?

Bull: So, I mentioned about Norway’s CO2 tax, you know, which is pretty significant. And plus, you can add the European ETS tax on top of that one. So, you can look at in some ways, we’ve been up towards 70 Euros a metric ton of CO2 offshore. That really does push you towards finding alternative solutions to energy efficiency or CCS. So, we will say taxes, though they work, there’s no doubt about it. So, carbon taxes are important.

What we see is really two big projects that we have in Norway one is called Sleipner, which is a gas condensate field and what is called Snohvit, which is an LNG plant, liquefied natural gas. Both those, the gas in those is sour gas. So, you have a high CO2 content, it’s off spec, you can’t sell that directly in the market. So, we take out the sour gas, we take out the essentially the CO2, and then we pump that down into a saline aquifer offshore. And we’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and we’ve got nearly 22 million tons of CO2 that we’ve stored there.

And we check seismic on this, we look at the plume the movement within the aquifer itself. This is a skill set that we bought into the company, we think there’s actually scalable in the future that we can actually use the North Sea, reuse the North Sea, and have a second wave in energy as it were, to actually stop storing CO2, both from oil and gas, but also from industrial emissions too.

Stone: You’ve talked about the development of a carbon hub in the North Sea. What exactly is that?

Bull: So, this is kind of first of a kind project that we’re looking into. We kind of call this project internally Northern Lights. And this is together with our partner Shell and Total. Concept for this one is that, together anchored with the Norwegian government, is that we can look for a full value chain of CCS, carbon capture and storage, really looking into industrial CO2 emissions. So, what we’re looking for is that we can underpin two capture plants in Norway. One is a cement factory and the other one is heat waste emissions from Oslo. It’s about 1 million tons of CO2 emissions. And we want to underpin that one we capture that we start we take this on transportation on boats, so we’ll actually ship this to the west coast of Norway and we’ll pump this down into a saline aquifer.

What’s important about this particular project is that it’s an open source CO2 project. So we can collect CO2 from the major industrial emissions, whether that’s in Rotterdam or it’s in Germany, or it could be in Teesside in the U.K. Major CO2 hubs where they produce a lot of CO2 in petrochemicals, fertilizer, steel, cement. Take the CO2 and store it in the North Sea. And we think this is a really important concept because Europe, European Union, has got cleared signals, it wants to be carbon neutral in 2050.

So, we’re still gonna have blue collar jobs, we are gonna have well paid technical jobs within the petrochemical sector, fertilizer sector, steel car, you name it, we need to find CO2 solutions here. So, we think we can do this together. And we think you know, what’s really exciting about is that we were going about 14 companies, forward looking European companies we’re thinking around that CO2 is a serious issue for their business model, from six different countries. And we’re really trying to pin this together. Very difficult business model. CO2 taxes are too low today to do that. So we need to look into certain bespoke support systems from national governments or from the EU.

Stone: Many of the carbon capture and storage systems that are in place right now, and there’s not a whole lot of them, but the ones that are, the carbon is used for enhanced oil recovery. Are you using that carbon to produce more oil and gas or is that simply going into a storage space under the ground, and that’s the end of it?

Bull: So our concept is for storage, we were not looking or intending to do this for enhanced or recovery.

Stone: Because my understand is oftentimes that’s important to the economics of the of the of the storage.

Bull: It is. So, if you think about that, there’s about 23 Major CO2 or CCS projects globally today. Majority are either related to sour gas or gas processing, or their related to EOR, enhanced oil recovery. For us, the enhanced oil recovery usually is done in the Rockies, many of the projects in the U.S. to do this to try and get uplift on oil and gas production. Our concept really is to actually just store this. Is to put the CO2 back on the ground.

And again, mentioned the business model involved in this is industrial capture from CO2 from a large industrial emitters. The other part as well is actually looking into decarbonizing our natural gas. So, we can take the essentially, the CH4, we take out the CO2, we can store the CO2, and then we have leftovers hydrogen as a pure product. If we can actually come with a clean hydrogen concept, develop this, and actually find a market for in Europe, then actually this offsets essentially are in our large gas exposure that we have in Europe. And this is what Europe is, you know, expecting for us to take leadership on actually decarbonizing the natural gas sector, the hard-to-decarbonize sector, like the heating sector, marine transportation, and also the power sector as well. And hydrogen does give some answers in that respect.

Stone: Going a step further on that that specific issue. How scalable is CCS? My understanding is that the economics of creating the reverse infrastructure, to transport your carbon, wherever it needs to go, to having access to those underground reservoirs where you can store, are all major issues. The cost could be very high the reverse infrastructure again to do this could be massive I’ve seen and again, this is off the top of my reading knowledge,

I don’t know how accurate this all is. So, I’m gonna put it out there. Three times the current size of the oil and gas industry to get enough carbon buried to actually have a significant climate impact. Number one, do the numbers I just gave you sound at all realistic? And two, if they are at least within the ballpark, is it realistic to create carbon capture and storage at a scale that’s going to make a significant climate impact?

Bull: I think, when you look at every IPCC report coming out, and particularly the result of rude awakening we saw in October from the IPCC of you know, the gap between 1.5 and 2 degree scenario is immense, you know, it does have huge implications. At the heart of every part of this, you have to have CCS. CCS is essential. So, I would say it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. If we’re going to make this on and actually get onto the climate trajectory, we need to. The technology is there. The issue is that the business model is missing, we have market failure today, there is no significant carbon tax to do this. So, we need to try and find solutions for this.

When it comes to breaking down the total cost of CCS, yes, it’s expensive. But then again, so was solar 10 years ago, so was onshore wind, so was offshore wind. Deployment, it really reduces the cost down each time. Keep it for us, particularly with the Northern Lights project and other partners, is that we can build a scalable business model here. So, the storage part is actually the economies of scale, that’s actually the smallest part of the total CO2 abatement cost is the capture, which is the pricey stuff.

Transportation is basically you can you can run that in through a transportation of a pipeline or through a ship. But getting to the level of deployment capture is going to be really important. So, if we try and think about how do we scale this up, we look into small scale capture of CO2. And these are small units, 20 foot containers that you could have, where you could capture 20 to 30% of CO2 emissions from a fertilizer plant, for example. That’s pretty good. You know, getting that one. And getting to that basis and building a business and value chain out of this is really important. So, the more we can deploy, this will we can bring the cost down.

And then we clearly do need to have a target your stake in the ground is that we need to have in the money concept of under 50 Euros a metric ton. And we had to be clear about you know what is important because that’s what policymakers want to hear. They want to understand. Okay, where are we going with this? How long do we have to support this industry before you’re in the money?

Stone: In 2018, Equinor spent $1.65 million on political lobbying in the United States. About three fourths of that was related to oil and gas interests. So granted, Equinor, like any company is going to look to do profitable projects and businesses. Yet should we all be worried that oil and gas companies are the wrong companies to lead us toward a net zero carbon future particularly when the same companies, such as Equinor, have a major stake in prolonging fossil fuel use for as long as possible?

Bull: I think the important thing about the oil and  gas companies being involved in you know, taking a stronger look again at renewables. And you can see this, you know, across many, you know, many industries. But if you think of particular some of the European majors, they’re making bigger bets on renewables, there’s no doubt about it. We are within offshore wind, we’re also developing competencies in solar, onshore wind, you can see Total are doing similar things, Shell is pushing it, BP is as well, you know. This is, there’s a movement going on here.

What’s important about this one is that the sheer size of our companies and our balance sheets means that you can really move the needle on renewables. And the key bit, again, is that what is a scalable business model for a company like us? We’re not going to do rooftop solar in Texas, you know, that’s not our thing. But doing major gigawatt scale, industry develops of offshore wind, based on our offshore wind background, is something that we can do, for sure. And again, I think you’re gonna see more and more the larger, the majors, getting involved in this looking into renewables as a sector. And I think this is really going to move the needle eventually. 

Stone: In Norway, oil and gas production accounts for about 23% of the country’s GDP, about two thirds of its exports and about 170,000 Norwegians are either directly or indirectly employed by the industry. What is the Norwegian government willing to bear in mitigating carbon costs in terms of its impact on this very important industry?

Bull: Norway’s strategy again, I think, if you look in several areas, one is think carbon capture and storage. So Norway’s supported, a lot of research into CCS and is also supported Technology Center Mongstad, which is the world’s largest CO2 capture site, U.S. Department of Energy, U.K. Department of Energy Base also support this. So, it’s been a lot of good support for this. The next phase is really can we get this Northern Lights project moving.

Northern Lights, the total cost of this one is looking at about $1.2 to $1.3 billion dollars to underpin this first part of the business model. That’s, that’s a big sum for you know, for a country like Norway, so Norway can’t carry those costs alone. It has to have support from other European governments. It needs support from the European Union, and it needs support from us in industry as well. So, it’s going to have to be a common approach, we need to take that together.

I think what’s important about the debate within Norway is that it’s CO2 taxes work, you know, it’s really push the efficiency on oil and gas, there’s no doubt about it. Norway is fully, you know, strongly rely on to oil and gas is a really important industry, not just for oil and gas, but also the technology that we have from oil and gas we use in the health sector, we’re using in the tech sector, you know, there’s a lot of spin off clusters that are important for the country. No doubt about it, they’re Norway’s looking for an energy transition path that produces you know, 100% renewables from hydroelectricity, it’s more export cables going to the rest of Europe. It is kind of looking like Euope’s battery, in some respects. It’s an energy powerhouse in itself, even though it’s a very small country.

So, I think you’re gonna see this again, you know, again, not in terms of oil and gas versus renewables. But both those solutions together, I think that’s where you’re going to see Norway’s really sort of impact on the European environment in the future there.

Stone: Stephen, thanks for talking.

Bull: Thank you, Andy.

Stone: Today’s guest has been Stephen Bull, Senior Vice President for Wind and Low Carbon Development at Norwegian energy company Equinor. Check out the Kleinman Center’s website for our latest research into energy and environmental policy. Our web address is kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu. And our Twitter handle is @kleinmanenergy. Thanks for listening to the podcast and have a great day.

guest

Stephen Bull

Senior Vice President, Equinor
Stephen Bull is Senior Vice President for Wind and Low Carbon Development at Equinor, and Chairman of RenewableUK, a renewable energy trade association.
host

Andy Stone

Energy Policy Now Host and Producer
Andy Stone is producer and host of Energy Policy Now, the Kleinman Center’s podcast series. He previously worked in business planning with PJM Interconnection and was a senior energy reporter at Forbes Magazine.