Oil City

I started my stay in Stavanger Monday night at the Big Horn Steak House serving American Midwest aged beef. My cousin had missed his 4:45 PM ferry and the next one was at 10:30 PM so he drove me all around telling me about Stavanger. Several members of my family live in Stavanger and several work out of Stanvanger for the oil companies. We found the house his father was born in, walked around City Park with it swans regally floating with their grown babies that haven’t turned white yet. At one end of the park is a large statue from America to “All the Norwegian Immigrants who helped to make America great”-nice to have someone that can read and speak Norwegian! Wouldn’t have known that if David hadn’t read it to me! Stavanger dates to Viking times and the oldest part of the city, the Gamle, is full of narrow, winding street with wood houses that come right up to the street Fire is and was a big hazard so in 1856 Stavanger build Valberget Tower where a man walked around the tower looking for any sign of a fire. The city started getting taller so another story was added to the tower. Today, it’s a nice place for tourist to view the city. Anyway, back to the Steak House. Almost every table around us was American-speaking and mostly men. American oilmen still come to Norway in droves for jobs or as consultants in the ever expanding oil industry.

There is the Oil Museum in the harbor built like a North Sea oil rig. It has actual equipment used for oil exploration, drilling, retrieval and processing. I didn’t try it, but some teenagers were flying out the escape hatch and being propelled 2 stories off the rig--they were laughing like it was fun! A video shows the construction and maintenance of the Ormen Lange pipeline that travels 1200 km. from western Norway to Easington, England through large pipes on the ocean floor. A simulation of a helicopter landing on an oil rig and then the living conditions on the rig are displayed. Most people—90% men—work 14 days on for 12 hours a day and then 4 weeks off. The history of oil in Norway is told through newspaper headlines and articles about the oil finds and how Norway is dealing with becoming rich from the oil. Oil was discovered in the North Sea in the mid 1960s and the first well, Ekofiske started producing in 1971. There are currently 62 offshore fields operating with about 200,000 people employed—yesterday, a new oil field with 50 year potential was discovered. Total revenue from 1971-2009 was 3,636 billion NOK ( Norwegian kroner) which accounts for 31% of the government revenue. 40% of the money has been spent and the rest goes into the “Petroleum Fund” set up in 1990 by the Storting (Parliament) to make sure that is isn’t squandered and that it goes for the good of all Norwegian people. A “real time” digital counter shows what the fund is worth “right now” with the last 9 numbers changing so fast that it’s impossible to read, but rounded off to the nearest billion, it’s 2,935,000,000,000! At least yesterday it was and that equals 500,000 for every man, woman and child in Norway. Norway doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the Dutch with their oil and tanked their economy as a result and the Storting and several committees oversee every aspect of exploration and production. Stavanger is the hub of the oil industry.

Oil has brought great wealth to Norway. It is one of the richest countries in the world and people like me are shocked by the prices, but many of my cousins mentioned that even though the country is rich, they have all the money they could possibly want, they summer at their seashore and mountain cabins, they winter in Spain, all education is free, all healthcare is free, all of them felt that Norway had lost something. Social problems such as drugs and alcohol have increased, prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants are way up, more people are seeing therapist and psychiatrist, and the culture of Norway has adversely changed. Obviously the government feels the same way and they have the” Norsk Monitor” that has been researching how happy the Norwegians are and why. Well, it turns out that happiness in Norway doesn’t come from being rich, but happiness comes from being richer than your neighbor!