Norway, which has become Europe’s biggest gas supplier after the war in Ukraine, will keep its deliveries at their current level “for the next four to five years,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr promised on Friday.
Jonas Gahr Støre received the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on a platform in the sea at the Troll reservoir, off the coast of Norway.
To compensate, at least in part, for the reduction in Russian deliveries, Norway increased its gas production last year and today covers between 30 and 40% of the continent’s needs.
30 to 40% of the continent’s needs
“Putin tried to blackmail the European Union by depriving us of 80% of the Russian gas supply,” Ursula von der Leyen pointed out.
Jens Stoltenberg, for his part, stressed the importance “of securing this type of infrastructure (such as the Troll depot, editor’s note) extremely important for our economies, our daily lives and also for our security.”
Located about 65 km west of Bergen, the country’s second largest city, Troll is Norway’s largest gas field and one of its largest oil fields: it alone provides the equivalent of 10% of gas consumption European.
The infrastructure is vulnerable, as demonstrated by the sabotage in September 2022 in the Baltic Sea of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
Drawing lessons from this worrying episode, NATO and the EU have established a working group to strengthen the protection of their critical infrastructure. Their first meeting took place on Thursday.
Following a German-Norwegian request, the Atlantic Alliance also agreed to create a coordinating body for the protection of maritime infrastructure.
In a sign of this heightened vigilance, two Norwegian and German ships were sailing off the platform on Friday, as well as a maritime surveillance plane and a helicopter.
Source: BFM TV
