Abstract
It is about 50 years since oil companies started to become interested in the North Sea and I will try to present a geologist perspective of this history. The discovery of oil offshore Norway represented an enormous challenge for teaching and research in the geosciences in Norway. I shall also try to put our petroleum resources in an international perspective and compare oil and gas with other fossil fuels such as oil shale, tar sand, coal and gas hydrates. The environmental consequences of exploiting these resources will be discussed. A consistent energy policy for Norway has been missing and decisions are mostly made based on short term economical predictions and ideology.
During the next decades, the world will be running out of unexplored sedimentary basins, and it will be difficult thereafter to meet the demand for conventional oil. An important factor is the rising oil consumption in Asia, which has only 4 % of the world oil reserves. The short term fluctuation in the oil price is very much influenced by political and economical factors. The longer term trends depend however, more on the primary occurrence of fossil fuels and on production technology. There are however very large reserves of fossil energy other than conventional oil, such as gas, heavy oil, tar sand, oil shale, gas hydrates and coal which can replace conventional oil, also as fuel for the transport sector. Will we be able to exploit these types of fossil fuel in an environmentally acceptable way? The supply of oil and gas must be seen in relation to other fossils fuels, and also alternative sources of energy such as nuclear energy, which will play a very important role when the production of conventional oil is insufficient to meet the demand.
Production of energy from many of the alternative fossil fuels such as tar sand, heavy oil and oil shale, requires solutions to significant environmental problems. The large reserves of fossil fuel will prevent us from running out of oil for a long time, but the increasing prices and environmental concerns will encourage alternative energy production