General information
The petroleum activity on the Norwegian Continental Shelf accounts for more than 1/3 of the Norwegian National Revenue and will continue to be the most important industry for Norway in the 21st century. Norway ranks as the world’s sixth largest oil producer and, more importantly for the world economy, is the third largest oil exporting country. Norway is the most important supplier of natural gas to the European market, together with Russia and Algeria. Thus, it is a national challenge to be in the technological forefront within petroleum recovery.
The potential additional petroleum resources available for roduction, if improved oil recovery technology can be developed in time has been documented by the OG21. This technology development has a great potential for becoming an important export industry and may represent one of the future high technological industries for Norway.
In addition, new technology can make marginal fields economical and reduce cost of development and operation of oil fields. Utilising this potential, however, demands efficient, sustainable and safe development and production of hydrocarbon fields. The full potential can only be fulfilled by development of new knowledge through an interdisciplinary approach, utilising the highly specialised competence found within fundamental research environments. In this process innovation power and recruitment as well as education of young scientists and engineers are absolute requirements. It is the vision of the CIPR to give a major contribution to this effort.
CIPR has had a very satisfactory scientific development, and we estimate to supersede the goals within the ten year frame of the CoE. The Centre researchers have in several occasions received high recognition, and CIPR has, in our own opinion, established an efficient organisation.
Integration of disciplinary petroleum research is a key fundament of the centre. Our experience so far, combined with advice from boards, industry, national authorities and international partners, has strengthen our arguments for the need of such research in order for the national and industrial goals for increased recovery of petroleum resources to be achieved. This also make it necessary to build an organisation which can handle large interdisciplinary research programs in good cooperation with the best research groups in basic research, at University of Bergen, other Norwegian universities, and internationally.
