Norway has been at the forefront of the environmentalprotection movement since the 1970s. Its battle against climate change long predates the world’s increasingly urgent attempts to scale back global warming, and to this day Norway remains one of the leading innovators in the field. With global demand for oil and gas likely to continue unabated for the foreseeable future, many of these ventures are focussed on reducing the adverse impact on the environment of the country’s oil and gas sector. Odfjell Drilling’s first batch of Mobile Offshore Wind Units (MOWUs), for instance, whose role is to provide energy to North Sea rigs, are scheduled to become operational later this year. “Our units are temporary installations and can be shut down when conditions get too harsh,” says CEO Simen Lieungh, “so they have the potential to reduce emissions by as much as 60 to 70%.”
Norway is renowned both for its highly educated workforce and its government’s long-standing emphasis on innovation, sustainability, and public-private partnerships. The result is its high-tech sector is immersed in several game-changing fields, such as artificial intelligence.
A case in point is Tomra, the recycling and mining multinational, which has had success harnessing AI to reduce wastage during the mineral sorting process. “Our new deep-learning technology allows for the precise detection and classification of individual particles, even when clustered,” says CEO Tove Andersen. “It also has the capability to unlock untapped value from low-grade ore and waste dumps.” Its potential therefore stretches way beyond traditional mining, particularly with the booming growth of electric vehicles. That growth is driving demand for the lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite that power EVs, while the amount of waste produced by their extraction is increasing in direct proportion.
Domestic demand for Tomra’s technology could be about to grow significantly too, following last year’s announcement that a “substantial” number of metals and minerals, ranging from copper to rare earth metals, had been discovered on Norway’s extended continental shelf.
Norway’s shipping industry is also rising to the environmental challenge, having funded several ground-breaking technological developments in electric maritime transport. This has helped make Norway home to several industry clusters at the cutting edge of the development of electric transport infrastructure, autonomous vehicle systems, electric ferries, an
