Chencked against delivery

Thank you very much and thank you to Oslo Energy Forum for sustaining this conference from the mountains of Sanderstølen and down to Holmenkollen. I think it is a good tradition and thank you for welcoming me.

I speak at many different occasions as Prime Minister and the title of what my address is almost now constantly Norway in more turbulent times. A bit adapted here and there, but that is the kind of mainstay of the themes.

Yesterday I was in Bergen and I had the opportunity to be in an exchange with Professor Timothy Snyder, the Yale professor who has emigrated to Canada for reasons that are highly political, I would say. And we spoke about the scope between his book 'On tyranny', which I recommend everybody to read, and his recent book 'On freedom'.

So we live in a time between tyranny and freedom. Ambassador for Ukraine can experience the first one, and all of us strive for the second, which is the notion of freedom. And in all of that, I believe we can place energy from the beginning of mankind doing anything purposeful.

Till today, energy has been key. And as I see it, whatever theme we choose for the transitions we are in, energy is linked. Be it in technology, be it on climate, but be it also in how you maintain stability in domestic economies.

If energy becomes vulnerable, political systems can crack. And one reason why my government introduced what my Norwegian listeners will recognize, the Norwegian price for electricity, was to maintain legitimacy of the electricity system. Because if the legitimacy of what people experience so important for your heating and for your electricity, if that is unstable and it is really ravaging your private economy, you can lose trust in more than only your electricity bills. It can really hit the foundation of a political system.

So in all of that, I think we have from the global to the kitchen table and in between we have work security, we have conflict between nations. We have opportunities to do things together. So the geopolitical landscape, I think, is really now at the core of all of this. We are not living in a rupture that is tearing everything down. But I think the Canadian Prime Minister was right to talk about a rupture in many areas, but we should also be careful not to take that too far.

We were reminded a month ago by the Director General of WTO that 80% of world trade still happens inside the rules of WTO. And the WTO that can reform, can also put frameworks that can help us still maintain trade and exchange.

Now we live through multiple challenges, and for Norway, we have defined energy as a core theme in our first national security strategy that was launched in May last year. It has three fundamental elements:

One restoring and capacitating our defence. National defence. It is a major and expensive undertaking. The second one is preparedness and resilience in the population, among people, among industry, throughout the economy. And the third one is economic security.

And basically in all these three notions energy is key.

So on security, it's not only imagining what can happen in case of war or a security crisis, but what do we do if electricity system is knocked out or if the data system is knocked out? How do we react as individuals, as companies, as a society.

And I agree with Anders Opedal that we can only move forward on these issues if we work together. Governments, private sector, industry and civil society. And we have experienced, I would say, in Norway a very direct and open exchange with industry during these four or five turbulent years with the energy crisis in Europe and where we are now when we move ahead.

Just one example: Norway has 9000km of pipelines connecting our gas from our shelf to Europe and to the UK. 9000km. And we are facing two double challenges here.

On the one hand, the vulnerability of those pipelines because they are there at the seabed. It's a rough climate.

But on the other hand, we have a neighbour in the north that has not only launched a full scale war against another neighbour, Ukraine, that being Russia, but also with clear threats against undersea infrastructure that we have to look into.

So what we did was really, the German chancellor and I, we took this issue to NATO and we have established a cooperation between NATO anchored center in the UK with private industry to have a better monitoring and better inspection of these infrastructures that are so key to our security.

So we have to make that real. Two weeks ago, we had a round table meeting in Hamburg at the invitation of the German chancellor of the North Sea states, talking about the renewable dimension on this, how do we interconnect and how do we build our renewable infrastructure, which is, of course, densely across the northern European coast up through the UK.

Norway is farther away in that geography, but that is the renewable part, which we are also strongly at. We are associated with oil and gas, but we are part of also the renewable transition into new sources.

So Norway in this has responsibility, opportunities, and really things to look after. As it was stated, we provide one third of Europe's gas. It is our ambition to keep that level as high as we can, smoothen the transition to the decline which will come in resources, and to do so in straight and predictable collaboration with our European partners.

And that means that I made this remark and it has been made a point of it. I have seen that at present, the European Union has proposed a moratorium on receiving energy from hydrocarbons in the Arctic. Now, there is no very specific exact definition of what is the Arctic. But what I can say is that it is in the Arctic.

So if you want to ban the import of energy for you have banned all the LNG that is coming from Norway and you have basically banned the opportunities which may be there in predictable deliveries in the future.

Again, we have to prepare for that natural decline which will come because of the resources, but we will still be conscious of the fact that we are a democratic partner country in Europe, providing energy to our partners. And I see that as a major responsibility that we will really look after and take seriously. Be a predictable and reliable energy provider.

At the same time, I see that there is a major responsibility to deliver on technology. And the fact now that we have the first full scale value chain CCS installation, which required heavy government involvement and investments, and I would say through successive governments from all spectrums of the political life.

Now that center can take its next step without subsidies. And I think that is a model of how we have to work on major energy breakthroughs, new technologies. We have to be there as a community in the launch, especially when we have defined as politicians climate targets that industry have to deliver on. Then we have to be there in the initiating phase.

The markets cannot fix that from the outset, but then gradually markets have to take over and that is now happening. So from our government, we have to secure stable and predictable investment conditions. When energy projects are launched we cannot change the framework conditions three years into the phase.

I'm very happy last year that that scenario for the northernmost reinstallation of Melkøya was fixed. I was asked by students yesterday in Bergen if I could define the price of one litre of milk, and the reference was to, Norwegians will understand the joke, Melkøya. Melkøya is not producing milk, but it is Melkøya. By the way, one litre milk, was about 21, 22 kroner, like a litre of fuel.

But the point here is that the predictability of those kind of transitions have to be secured, because across the Atlantic, we see that predictability for investment regimes in major investment projects are put in doubt. And that is a dangerous thing.

Then we have to link energy into our security cooperation. So, part of how we work as allies, part as how Norway works with the European Union, when economic security becomes the them, is coming at the agenda. We have the EEA agreement, which links Norway to the European market, also in the energy field.

But there's one next step that we have to discuss together. And that is when Europe is looking after its economic security. It's by European approach. We have to see to it that Norway is integrated in that approach, and that's part of our dialogue with the European Union.

So in closing remarks, I think that we can safely predict that our part of the world and the world at large will need more energy.

It's still the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people that have no energy, no electricity. And I think we have learned in the climate and development debate that until you have access to energy, everything else becomes secondary.

You cannot expect from people who don't have electricity that they will take climate responsibility. Once you have electricity, you have energy, then you have an economy that is working.

But we will need more energy. It will have to be renewable. We have to invest in battery storage capacity. We have to launch into technologies which are low tech, such as the Clean Cooking Initiative that I have been taking together with the IEA and with my partner in France and also African countries, to provide technologies to households that can invest in low tech technology that will be major breakthroughs for health.

Today the average household woman in an African economy has health danger by inhaling indoor smoke pollution from burning to have fuel. And it is a lag on the economy, and it is a really obstacle to any kind of economic development.

We can make major breakthroughs with minor investments on that path towards more kind of an energy independence. And for us, and I'll end on this, in the petroleum sector, you know, the mantra that we will develop, not dismantle this sector. We are going into a transition. It will have to be demand driven and the demand for new sources will come through the renewable path.

But still we have a responsibility to continue exploration, production and deliveries to our partners in Europe. We will move forward on renewables. We have a major opportunity from offshore wind with the world's second longest coastline.

And I think a key factor here is to have stable terms of investment for the energy sector. We need to cooperate and diversify. And let me say, as we move into this Munich security conference, and I look at the Ukrainian ambassador, one theme that we are discussing in the Nordic-Baltic family is how we can step up what we do in terms of supporting Ukraine in the energy field, because energy, again, is just illustrating the terrible consequences of war.

The Russians have suffered, I would say, major political and military defeat in all fronts, in terms of what they were trying to achieve. Instead, they are going after what? Namely, the entire energy infrastructure in energy production, energy grid systems. And we have to be there to support them.

Norway, for its part, are co-financing purchase of gas for the Kiev region and for other urban regions, but also equipment and technology to rebuild and to build back better.

So that, I think, is an illustration of how this theme is in every perspective of security, multiple challenges. And the only way, again, we can do that is by working together at a global level, but also in every national setting.

Thank you for your attention.