Equinor ASA has been awarded 35 new production licenses across the Norwegian Continental Shelf, including 18 licenses in the North Sea, 10 in the Norwegian Sea and 7 in the Barents Sea. These awards expand EQNR’s exploration and production footprint by more than 6,000 square kilometers of acreage. Successful applicants must finalize work programmes by the end of this year, with the first seismic surveys scheduled for Q3 2026. EQNR estimates that the new licenses could add up to 150 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent over the next decade, reinforcing its long-term reserve replacement ratio target of at least 100 percent annually.

A senior EQNR executive told Reuters that the company aims to approve the final development technical plan for the Wisting field in the Barents Sea by December 2024. Following engineering optimizations and a renegotiation of supplier contracts, total project development costs have been cut by approximately 25 percent, from an initial NOK 95 billion estimate down to NOK 71 billion. The revised cost structure improves the breakeven price by an estimated USD 10 per barrel. Wisting’s first oil is now targeted for mid-2028, with a peak production rate of 70,000 barrels per day.

Equinor has awarded long-term maintenance and upgrade contracts worth NOK 100 billion to a consortium of seven supplier companies, covering both onshore facilities in Stavanger and key offshore installations in the North Sea. The agreements span 10 years and include the deployment of digital monitoring systems, integrity inspections and platform life-extension work. EQNR projects that these upgrades will support a production increase to 1.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2035, compared with the current output level of approximately 950,000 barrels daily.