Why Norway is Becoming the World's Richest Country

In terms of population, Norway is a fairly small

country

, home to only about 52 million people, to put this in perspective, Norway has less population than many of the

world

's city-states, such as the 6 million inhabitants of Singapore or the almost 1.5 million Hong Kong inhabitants, but although small in population Norway is very large in territory, the

country

has around 385,000 square kilometers of total territory, approximately 140 times larger in geographical area than Hong Kong and approximately 464 times larger than Singapore despite having less population than in any other sense. Norway's geographical size is also roughly equivalent to that of Japan and both countries have a similar number of mountains covering them, and yet Japan has 22 times more people living within its similar mountainous area than Norway.

Naturally, this makes Norway one of the least populated and generally emptiest countries. Countries in the

world

with the lowest population density that can be found anywhere in mainland continental Europe, with the northern half of the country extending beyond the Arctic Circle in the far north with a very thin layer of soil over Bedrock, the land from Norway. It is mostly a mountainous area, harsh, steep and very cold, with a short growing season. An environment that does not lend itself very well to supporting large numbers of people. Only 2.2% of Norway's land is considered even suitable for agriculture.

One of the lowest percentages in the country. world and roughly equivalent to the percentage of Yemen a mountainous country in the Arabian desert without even rivers that is widely considered a failed state, this ultimately means that despite having 385,000 km of total land, only about 7,124 square kilometers of Norwegian lands are suitable for agriculture and poultry farming. similar amount to the amount of arable land found in El Salvador, a country that is 16 times smaller than Norway in terms of total land, but which has a similar population of around 6.3 million people because the two countries They have a similar amount of arable land that they can actually use to sustain their populations and then to make things even worse for Norway, their small amounts of arable land are scattered all over the south of the country in small valleys between all of their huge mountains, what has always facilitated the creation of large integrated and efficient Farms in the country are impossible with its vast and wide open expanses of arable land throughout the country.

As a result, the average farm size in the United States is more than eight times that of Norway, making American farms more integrated. As a result it is more efficient and more productive and can simply feed many more people because of these inherent disadvantages when it comes to agricultural potential, throughout Norway's history there have been expectations and assumptions made by people throughout from Norwegian history that the country should be naturally poor or at least that Norway was historically a poor country until the sudden discovery of oil changed everything in the late 1960s and paved the way for Norway's now known prosperity , but the interesting truth is that oil didn't actually make Norway richer, it just made it even richer. than it was previously, contrary to popular belief, Norway has been a relatively wealthy country for most of its history and, almost counterintuitively, it has to do with exactly the same geography that makes the country so terrible for agricultural production.

There are other geographical factors that can determine the fate of nations beyond agricultural potential and one of the most important is how easy it is to travel around the country's territory and carry out commercial transport through Norway by land; However, it has always been very difficult for thousands of years before modern roads and tunnels traveled along. Touring the west coast of Norway on foot or horseback was basically impossible due to the ubiquitous rugged mountains and deep FS that carved the entire landscape, but this seemingly geographical first actually became one of Norway's greatest geographical blessings and disguises due to all the irregular fjords located everywhere.

Across the Norwegian coast, Norway is generally considered to have by far the longest coastline in Europe, with a coastline that is more than 6 and a half times longer than that of the United Kingdom, according to the World Data Book. the CIA. In fact, the coast of Norway is considered to be like this. Huge because of all these fjords, it is ranked as the second longest coastline of any country in the world, trailing only Canada's number one spot, this always means that as Norway merged into a modern nation state , its small population was always dispersed in small groups along the mountains and the fs were separated from each other across the land, not unlike other mountainous societies such as Afghanistan or Persia, but unlike those societies in deep in the interior of Eurasia, the small population groups scattered throughout Norway had easy and immediate access to the global ocean due to all the fs that went deep into the interior of Norway, this geography encouraged the development of a maritime culture within Norway from very early on and the fs gave the Norwegians the ability to travel quickly between each other's settlements by sea, plus the fs allowed traders easy access to penetrate deep into the interior of the country and approach one of Norway's greatest natural assets: its enormous forests and timber resources.

Norway has never had the largest forest in Europe; It has been surpassed by many other countries with larger forests such as Russia. Finland, Sweden and even France, but for centuries throughout the sale era before the development of railways unlocked Russia's timber potential. Norway's timber industry was the largest in Europe due to the relatively easier access to its inland forests via the fs. and exported to markets. Norway's timber could be felled inland and then cheaply and efficiently dumped into rivers and floated down rivers to settlements and sawmills along the fjords, where sawmills powered by those same downhill rivers and their Waterfalls would refine the wood and the wood could then be exported cheaply through the US to the world market, and so on until the late 18th century, when railroads fully unlocked the timber potential of European countries with larger forests. such as Russia, Finland and Sweden.

These relative geographical advantages made Norway Europe's logging powerhouse for centuries, and the country's maritime culture allowed it to build a world-class merchant fleet. By the time the 20th century arrived, Norway already had the fourth largest merchant marine fleet in the world. Norway's nature was well-connected but also dispersed in a low-density population. encouraged two things: one, that all the communities were connected to each other by the fs and by the sea, which led to the emergence of a common identity among all of them despite their mountainous geography, and two small population groups in Norway learned From the beginning to cooperate together in shipbuilding and construction for the common benefit of all, entire Norwegian cities would cooperate together in building ships that were vital to their survival and the ownership shares of the ship would be divided between almost all of the inhabitants of the city that participated, from the lumberjacks to the artisans.

At the same time, this resulted in a much more dispersed and decentralized distribution of wealth and property in Norway, as well as a dispersed and decentralized population, so that a large, centralized and powerful class of capitalists never really developed in the country of the same way they did it in other places. In places like France and Britain, with their populations and economies largely concentrated around their political capitals, Norway's geography forced its people to trust each other and cooperate in building ships that were vital to their survival, so shipbuilding in Norway was largely cooperative in nature, that influenced the country's economy for centuries until the present day as Norwegian agriculture, forestry.

Marine insurance and fishing became dominated by cooperatives, while the Norwegian banking sector throughout the 19th and 20th centuries became effectively dominated by credit cooperatives as throughout the 19th century, when Norway was widely believed to be a A fairly poor region, Norway was actually already doing very well in relative terms in the 1850s. Norway's GDP per capita was already higher than basically all of Eastern Europe, surpassing that of Bulgaria. Romania Poland Hungary and Czechoslovakia and by the 1880s Norway's GDP per capita had also eclipsed virtually all of southern Europe, including Portugal, Spain and Greece, while by the early 20th century in 1900 it had surpassed even that of Italy and then in 1938 on the eve.

After the Second World War, decades before the discovery of oil in the country, Norway's GDP per capita had already surpassed that of Germany, France and the United Kingdom and, according to some estimates, it was already on average the

richest

country in Europe , much of the reason why Norway's economy accelerated so rapidly between 1900 and 1938 was that the arrival of modern water turbines and hydroelectric dams further revolutionized Norway's geographic potential. Norway is a land that is almost completely covered by rivers that start high in the mountains and then thunder downwards. Their steep elevations to the fs and the coast in the west, these rivers are fed by predominantly westerly winds that bring them abundant levels of precipitation and their steep falls and waterfalls provide an enormous amount of kinetic energy that can be captured by turbines to Norway therefore has one of the highest hydropower potentials of any country in the world and, starting in 1905, they began allowing foreign companies with higher levels of experience to come in and begin building modern hydroelectric dams to unlock its potential.

Hydroelectric plants were built throughout the country to the point that today there are 84 large hydroelectric plants with capacities greater than 10 megaw and 838 small hydroelectric plants with capacities between 1 and 10 megaw, in addition to hundreds of even smaller plants. All of these hydropower plants combined today are powerful enough to generate an overwhelming 95% of all of Norway's total electricity demand, while Norway is the seventh largest producer of hydropower worldwide in 2024, with a rate of total generation that will be more than half of In the United States, but only for 167th of the American population, the exploitation of Norwegian hydromite in the early 20th century provided the country with its first major economic boom, as allowed it to rapidly industrialize and electrify.

In 1920, Norway consumed more electricity per person. capita than any other country in the world and more than two-thirds of the population already had access to electricity, which was double the rate of the United States at the time. This enormous amount of energy for such a small population allowed the Norwegians to develop extremely high energies. -intensive factories that over time specialized in the production of refined aluminum under the Norsk Hydro corporation, which today is one of the largest aluminum companies in the world. Norsk Hydro continues to obtain the vast majority of the energy they use to produce refined aluminum from Norwegian hydroelectric power. and the company is 34% publicly owned by the Norwegian state, which has allowed Norway to become by far the largest aluminum producer in Europe and the eighth largest producer in the world today, making the country the largest aluminum supplier to the European Union.

But hydropower continued to unlock Norway's potential in the early 20th century, the industry became dominated by large foreign companies that came to Norway to invest in and build all the dams, so Norway gradually sought to rest control over them. to ensure its own national control over its own resources Norway's small, dispersed population lacked large amounts of capital and technical expertise; However, they needed large foreign investors to help them develop their hydroelectric and factory potential, so a rapid nationalization of the foreign investors' assets took place. they would have sent all the foreign investment and expertise they needed fleeing in the future to avoid that outcome but still ensure their own control over their own resources.

Norway decided to take a pragmatic, long-term approach to the hydropower industry that would influencedirectly into your focus. to the oil and gas industry decades later, Norway established rules that foreign companies coming to invest in the Norwegian Hydra would have to follow, which included clauses that the hydroelectric plants and mines they built and financed would have to be handed over. to the Norwegian government without compensation. After a period of 60 to 80 years of operation, in this way the largest foreign companies would continue to invest in the country, since they would obtain a long enough return on their investment, but the Norwegian State knew that in the long term they would be the ones They secure the keys to their crown jewels and, as a result, more than 90% of Norway's hydraulic capacity is today public property of the state and this is the reason why Norway was already a rich, heavily industrialized, democratic and with low corruption when interest arose in the The country's potential offshore oil and gas fields emerged in the late 1950s, but at that time there were very few people who really believed that oil or gas could be found throughout the country , especially in the shallow and submerged part of the European coast. continental shelf that extends under the North Sea and a large part of which, from a geological point of view, was recently submerged a few thousand years ago, at the end of the previous Ice Age, according to a letter written by the Service Geological Survey of Norway in 1958, which has since aged quite poorly.

They concluded that the possibility of oil or gas resources being discovered on the Norwegian part of this continental shelf should be ruled out entirely, but suddenly, in 1959, just the year after that letter was written, it was made. a major natural gas discovery nearby, which sparked increased interest. The Grenan gas field in the north of the Netherlands turned out that the Grin field to date is the eleventh largest natural gas field ever discovered in the world and the largest ever discovered in the country. On the European continent, it became central to the early emergence of the Netherlands as a major gas-producing country and became the cornerstone of the European domestic gas market and thus naturally its discovery in 1959 sparked renewed interest in the curiosity that perhaps there was more gas. and potentially even oil discovery has yet to be made further afield, under the still unexplored North Sea.

Three years later, in 1962, American oil giant Phillips was the first to submit a request to the Norwegian government to begin exploring inland oil and gas resources. In its section of the North Sea, the only problem was that at that time no one really knew where the Norwegian section of the North Sea actually was because the maritime boundaries within the North Sea had not yet been firmly or legally established between all nations. that surrounded her. but fortunately for Norway in 1965, eager to start exploring and drilling, the UK government quickly agreed to simply divide the continental shelf beneath the North Sea based on the principle of median line distance (the geographic line that runs along the center of the North Sea). between the land territory of the United Kingdom and the land territory of Norway decades later, this hasty calculation would greatly benefit the Norwegians because it took into account all of Norway's thousands of islands just off its western coast to determine where the median line ran, including the island. of UTA 16 km west of the Norwegian mainland coast, which moved the boundary of the median line westward a few kilometers further than when the huge Stratch Yard oil field was discovered later in the 197s, just Along the median line, only 15% of it would exist within the previously agreed UK Maritime Zone, while 85% of it would exist within the Norwegian Zone, giving literally billions of dollars in oil revenues. additional to the Norwegians over the British as a result, almost immediately after agreeing with the British on the median.

Initially, in 1965 the Norwegian government began granting exploration licenses to larger and more experienced foreign companies to search its waters, including Phillips, and the first oil was found only a couple of years later, in 1967, on a field they called Boulder, but it was not considered economically viable at the time, it would not be until the 1990s, three decades later, when Balder would finally begin operating and finally, just before Christmas Day 1969 , Phillips gave the Norwegian government and people perhaps the greatest Christmas gift in all of their nation's millennia. History broke the news that they had discovered the Echo Fisk field, which turned out to be one of the largest offshore oil fields ever discovered before or from anywhere in the world.

Production of Echo Fisk began just a couple of years later, in 1971, and then over the next few years a series of major oil and gas discoveries were made across the Norwegian continental shelf, in fields such as Stratford, Osberg, Gfax and Troll, the latter of which created a media sensation in 1996, when the Norwegians transported the Troll to an offshore oil platform. To date this operation remains the heaviest and tallest structure ever moved by humans from one part of the Earth's surface to another. It was also during this time that the Norwegians quickly began to apply the earlier lessons they had learned with the country's hydroelectric industry to the rapidly growing oil and gas industry, as well as the country founded a state-owned oil and gas company to which They initially called stat oil almost immediately after the first oil production began and like the pragmatic long-term approach that the Norwegians took with the country's hydropower industry in the early 20th century, they began to establish rules that companies Larger and more experienced foreign oil and gas companies would have to continue to invest in Norwegian resources that would ensure Norway's eventual consolidation. control over them, the Norwegian state-owned Stat Oil would always have a more than 50% stake in every production license the government granted, which was designed to give the largest and most experienced foreign oil and gas companies an incentive to continue. coming and investing in the country while providing stat oil with valuable real-world experience through learning from joint ventures and Norway's previous high levels of experience in the shipbuilding industry proved invaluable to the rapid mastery of Norway's offshore and subsea oil and gas infrastructure projects. of the world's leading subsea oil and gas infrastructure companies is currently below C7 with billions of dollars in annual revenue and were founded as a joint venture in 2002 by an American company and a Norwegian shipbuilding company known as the name was changed to what Econo knows today and what it is today thanks to the foresight of Norway, which has guided the company and helped it gain foreign experience over decades ecor is itself a major global energy company and is ranked as the 10th largest oil and gas company in the world with a current market cap of approximately $85 billion, putting it in a similar position to BP's current market capitalization at around 98.3 thousand million Equinor now produces approximately 70% of all oil and gas on the Norwegian continental shelf today and remains majority owned 67% by the Norwegian government, with the remaining 33% of its shares listed on stock exchanges. such as the New York Stock Exchange on the NASDAQ, it turned out that there was actually a lot of oil and gas on the Norwegian continental shelf, so much so that Norway now has the largest oil reserves in Europe outside of Russia and is ranked 20 in the world with similar volumes to former OPEC countries Angola and Ecuador, and with more than three times more reserves than the next place in Europe just across the North Sea, the United Kingdom and, in In terms of natural gas, Norway is once again ranked as having the largest reserves in Europe outside Russia and the 21st in the world with volumes similar to Kuwait and Aeron and with its extremely close proximity to the Union European.

Market Norway also had a ready export market, with hardly any oil and gas resources of its own beyond the Gren gen gas field in the Netherlands, the EU has practically always had to import the vast majority of oil and gas. They consume oil from abroad, although for the EU it was a much easier problem to solve because oil can effectively be imported from anywhere else in the world. The block was less handicapped by geography here because in its crude form oil is a liquid that can be easily loaded. It was loaded up in barrels or containers and shipped across the oceans on container ships from source to destination, which meant the EU could easily import oil from as far away as the Americas in Nigeria without worry, but natural gas It was a completely different problem for Europeans to solve.

Gas is much more difficult and expensive to export and move around the world than oil because, well, it is a gas, while it is in its tank it takes up an enormous amount of volume and it is completely economically impractical to load it onto ships. container ship and send it to another place. Therefore, before the increase in liquefied natural gas production, gas markets were highly regional in nature for Europe, this meant building a series of gas pipelines to transport natural gas from relatively nearby sources to consumers, the largest of which which were built during the 20th and early 21st centuries. from the relatively nearby gas sources in the Netherlands, Algeria, the Soviet and later Russian fields in Siberia, from aeran after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of course from Norway and the Norwegian continental shelf, this historically made The EU was mainly dependent on natural gas imports from three of its closest and largest neighbors, Russia, Norway and Algeria, as of 2021 Norway had built a total of 11 undersea gas pipelines connecting its gas resources directly to European consumers and Then, in 2010, Norwegian gas production surpassed the country's oil production for the first time as demand in the EU and the UK continued to grow for longer and, by the 2010s, Norway had already become in the second largest exporter of natural gas to the EU, only behind the Russians, in 2021, the year immediately before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia was supplying around 40% of the EU's total gas imports, while Norway supplied around another 25% of them, while Russia also supplied the EU with around 25% of its oil imports, compared to the Norway's share of 99.4% of its oil imports and, by that time, With billions of dollars a year gushing into the Norwegian economy, Norway had already effectively become a Petro State (the only one in Europe besides Russia) in 2021, oil and gas accounted for about 21% of all Norwegian GDP and accounted for a whopping 51% of all Norwegian exports in value, but Norway never really evolved into the usual stereotypes of corruption and authoritarianism of the petate for several notable reasons that notably distinguish it from the others;

Furthermore, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what actually constitutes a Petro State. The definitions revolve around countries whose economies rely heavily on the extraction and export of oil and gas to the point where without those industries their economies could face collapse. 25 countries around the world generally come to mind spanning South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. as the world's most classic examples of petro states and the 25, each of them is considered by The Economist's democracy index as authoritarian regimes or hybrid regimes, except only two of them, Indonesia and Norway, but Norway stands out above all. the rest are ahead of even Indonesia because the same Economist index literally ranks Norway as the most democratic, free and equal society on the face of the Earth, putting its status as the State of Petra in extremely stark contrast to countries like Saudi Arabia.

Iran, Russia and Venezuela, which are among the most authoritarian and corrupt states in the world and a large part of the reason why the abundance of oil and gas resources did not turn Norway into a strongly authoritarian and corrupt state like most of thethe rest. The states of Petra are due to the country's geographical history and the forward-looking policies that its government enacted from the beginning, when Norway discovered oil, the country already had a long culture of communal ownership of natural resources dating back centuries. , to the country's timber and hydroelectric industries. it was already rich, industrialized, highly developed and had a stable functioning democracy where wealth and power were already highly decentralized.

As a result, democratic institutions and community ownership of resources were already deeply embedded in the fabric of Norwegian society, which is an incredibly stark contrast to almost all other countries that discovered enormous oil and gas riches Saudi Arabia discovered its oil wealth when it was ruled by a warlord who had established an absolute monarchy and had already centralized power around him, so the oil wealth only further consolidated the power of the monarchy. It was similarly discovered in Iran while the country was ruled by an autocratic monarchy and the keys to the oil wealth were inherited by the still autocratic Islamic revolution after 1979.

Oil was discovered within Russia during the Tsarist period and the keys to the oil wealth was inherited by the still autocratic Soviets and then inherited by the modern Putin regime oil was discovered in Venezuela during the autocratic military dictatorship of Juan Vente Gómez, while oil industries in Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and throughout Africa were basically handed over directly from autocratic European countries. From colonial administrations to autocratic dictatorships that immediately or very quickly took power in place of all the countries that ever discovered enormous oil and gas riches, only a handful did so while already rich, politically independent and with stable traditions of democracy and low levels.

Norway was therefore better prepared to handle the sudden influx of oil and gas wealth than most others, but it still initially caused the Norwegian economy to quickly become undiversified. and dependent on oil and gas anyway during the 1970s and early 80s when the oil price was high, the Norwegian oil-dependent economy was booming, but then in 1986 the oil price suddenly collapsed and with it the Norwegian economy, heavily dependent on oil, suffered its first oil-induced crisis. recession in the last six decades of history, dating back to 1960, the Norwegian economy has only contracted three times: in 2020 during the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, in 2009 during the depths of the great financial crisis and in 1988 during the depths of this oil recession, but the Norwegian government learned a valuable lesson from this recession in the 1980s: it needed to diversify away from the unpredictable ebbs and flows in the oil market and therefore hardly A couple of years later, in 1990, the Norwegian state with its long history of communal ownership of resources and democratic institutions had the foresight and capacity to establish the global pension fund, also known as the so-called oil fund, the fund was established as a communal sovereign wealth fund owned by the Norwegian state and people to which surplus revenues from the state oil company Equinor and taxes on the oil and gas industry would be transferred. it would be invested for the benefit of Norway's future generations and to diversify the government and economy away from oil and gas.

Strict rules and guidelines were put in place around the operations of the funds in which he would invest heavily in the global real estate and stock markets to diversify away from the Norwegian economy and very strict rules were put in place that no more than the 3% of the fund's assets in a given year, which not only allowed the fund to continue to grow and capitalize over time, but also prevented abuse of the fund's assets. by Norwegian politicians who would otherwise be tempted to promise to lavishly spend oil wealth today at the expense of tomorrow in order to get elected.

A hallmark of Petra's more autocratic states, where unpopular regimes or dictators lavishly spent oil wealth on their people as a sort of deal to get them to put up with their authoritarianism and as the Norwegian oil and gas industry continued to grow and deposit With more wealth in the oil fund and the world economy continuing to grow along with it and withdrawals limited to no more than 3% annually, the Norwegian oil funds steadily evolved from nothing in 1990 to the absolute giant it is today. . Currently, the fund is by far the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

His current net assets exceed more than 1 billion and 2 billion dollars. The fund owns approximately 1.5% of all shares of the more than 9,000 listed companies in the world and is currently the largest investor in the global stock market, making the fund the largest whale in the stock market. values ​​of the world. This despite the fact that the Norwegian economy itself only represents about 0.5% of the entire global economy and, despite the fact that the Norwegian population only represents about 0.07% of the world's human population and yet , they own 1 and 12% of the world stock market, the oil fund is currently so enormous relative to the small population of Norway, that it is worth approximately $275,000 per Norwegian citizen if they ever decided to withdraw it all and it has already reached a point at which funds with a conservative withdrawal rate cap of 3% per year can safely cover about 20% of the total.

The Norwegian government's annual budget in perpetuity gives Norway the ability to be less dependent on unpredictable oil and gas price fluctuations. Revenue to continue funding its government operations and protecting the country from future oil price collapses now returns to the Norwegian oil and gas industry which the country controls. The 20 largest proven oil reserves and the 21 largest proven natural gas reserves have given Norway the ability to become the world's 13th largest oil producer and 9th largest gas producer, accounting for approximately 2% of world demand for oil and 3% of world gas. demand, but Norway's rather modest shares in global oil and gas reserves and production are absolutely dwarfed by Norway's enormous shares in global oil and gas exports, despite being only the 13th largest oil and gas producer. have only the twentieth largest reserve.

Norway is currently eighth in the world. largest oil exporter and is rapidly closing in on Kuwait's exports in seventh place even though Kuwait has 12 and a half times more oil reserves than Norway and 50% more oil production and is even more unbalanced when It is about natural gas, where despite being only Norway, it is the ninth largest producer in the world and ranks 21st in terms of reserves, Norway is the fourth largest exporter in the world, in any case just behind the big three in the world gas market: United States, Russia and Qatar, the latter of which the Norwegians are rapidly approaching an acquisition to become Now one of the top three in the global gas industry.

Norway has been able to achieve this huge presence in its share of global oil and gas exports due to several different factors, the first of which is, of course, its proximity to energy-hungry countries. European Union and its ability to build subc gas pipelines directly from source to consumer. The next factor is Norway's small population, which naturally has a lower demand for energy than countries with similar reserves but much larger populations such as Angola, Ecuador and Aeron, while the third and possibly largest factor. It is the result of Norway's own geography and strategically chosen policies. Norway produces enough renewable hydropower through all its rivers and dams to supply 95% of the country's electricity demand and, in addition to having the largest hydroelectric potential in Europe, the country also has one of the largest wind potentials, as well Like the coasts around Norway and the mountains that run along the spine of the country, they are among the windiest places you can find on a continent that is generally not a very windy place, so in addition to having Norway's seventh largest installed hydropower capacity already has the eighteenth largest installed wind capacity in the world and has enormous untapped potential that is just beginning to grow, so in addition to having large amounts of oil and gas, the country also has enormous amounts of renewable energy.

They also have energy potential and have been using that potential to their strategic advantage: they effectively keep all of their renewable hydro and wind resources internally to meet their own energy demands indefinitely, which has freed them to sell most of their energy resources. oil and gas. which they really don't need for foreigners abroad and especially for the energy hungry EU that is right next door and in addition to harnessing their local hydro wind and even geothermal potential to effectively convert their entire electrical grid to 100% renewable energy produced in the country, they are also further reducing the amount of fossil fuels their country consumes by offering generous tax and financial incentives to their citizens to adopt fully electric vehicles or EVS and, as a result, a whopping 88% of all new car sales in Norway in 2022 were EVS, which is by far the highest market share that electric rental vehicles have achieved so far in any country in the world and, given that these pro-e policies have been implemented in Norway for For a long time, almost one in three vehicles on Norwegian roads are already electric vehicles that do not consume oil and are instead powered by the state's national renewable hydro, wind and geothermal resources, and for Norway it is much more than simply reducing emissions and combating climate change; it is also about national security and financial power, the more the Norwegian power grid has become. driven by renewable sources within Norway, the safer the country became as it had to rely on imports and foreign energy supply chains and the more of its own oil and gas resources it could sell abroad and the more money it could invest in its sovereign wealth. funds to diversify their economy further away from oil and the more EVS they adopt within the country that can be powered indefinitely by their domestic renewable sources, then they will not need even more domestic oil resources and will be able to sell them abroad.

Continuing to pour even more money into the sovereign wealth fund to diversify even further away from oil is a cascading strategy that has been diligently pursued in Norway for decades and is steadily transforming the country into one of, if not the most powerful and influential states. , of Europe. Therefore, Norway's unique philosophy and doctrine in the 21st century is that its oil and gas resources should be produced and sold to foreigners, while its renewable resources should be harnessed and meet the needs of the Norwegian people. This clever and unique strategy has established them. be able to sell and export virtually all the oil and gas they produce while being completely energy independent, which is why Norway's modest global oil and gas reserves and production levels They absorb a much larger share of the world's total exports. and how the country has become so spectacularly rich in the process, the results of all this prudence and decades of forward-thinking strategic thinking culminated in 2022, after the Russians decided to invade Ukraine after unleashing the biggest war in Europe since the world.

During World War II, the European Union decided to begin shutting down its previously massive imports of Russian oil and gas to deny the Kremlin its main source of funding for its War Machine attempting to invade Ukraine, but of course the EU had to quickly find someone else to help him. begin to replace Russia's previously large shares of 25% of its oil imports and 45% of its gas imports, and Norway, with its large oil and gas resources in close proximity and friendly relations, was the best positioned country of the world to take advantage of the situation and Consequently, to meet demand, exports of Norwegian oil in tankers, gas through pipelines and even liquefied gas or LNG in tankers began to increase towards the EU market to replace the Russians, and theNorway's total share of EU oil imports rose from 99.5% just before the war to 13.3% in the first quarter of 2023, making Norway currently the EU's largest oil supplier. .

Norway's share of imported piped gas from the EU also skyrocketed from 38.1% just before the war to a whopping 46.1% in the first quarter of 2023, while the share of imported LNG from the EU rose from virtually nothing just before the invasion to 6.6% in the first quarter of 2023, the bloc's fifth-largest LNG supplier now overall and at the same time as Norway's oil and gas export volumes at a Suddenly desperate EU were rising rapidly. Global oil and gas prices were rising rapidly along with them. The result of this situation caused by Russia has been an absolute financial bonanza for Norwegians like never before: the country earned a whopping $12.3 billion in revenue. of its oil and gas industry alone in 2022 and then immediately broke that record with another $131 billion in oil and gas revenue throughout 2023, compared to the relatively low $29 billion in oil and gas revenue they earned before the war and the energy crisis in 2021.

Norway's oil and gas revenues in 2023 alone were roughly equivalent to the entire collective GDP of Slovakia and they have been using their sudden windfall very wisely: they have invested huge amounts in the sovereign wealth fund and tens of billions of dollars more are being invested. More pipelines are being built to Europe to further expand its export capacity and further replace the Russians' previous market share compared to Norway. Russia's growing displacement in the European energy market was perhaps best symbolized in September 2022: on the 27th of that month, a series of bombs detonated underwater, destroying sections of the Nordstream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines connecting factories and German households directly with the enormous Russian giant. natural gas fields in Siberia, both gas pipelines were left completely inoperable due to sabotage that destroyed Russia's ability to export gas directly to Germany, and then the next day the Norwegians and Poles inaugurated the opening of the Baltic Pipe, the new gas pipeline from Norway to Poland, which will replace all of the approximately 60% of Poland's natural gas imports that came from Russia with Norwegian gas.

Norway has therefore become the largest single energy supplier to the European Union in the 2020s and is unlikely to become so in the future. limited to oil and gas exports in the future, as climate change progresses, precipitation levels in Scandinavia are expected to rise more than they are today, meaning even more water will flow into Norway's rivers that cascade down the mountains. towards the west coast, while Norway's still largely untapped wind potential is expected to expand to make the country a world leader in wind energy. Norway probably won't need all this excess renewable hydropower and wind power just for itself in the future and has therefore already mooted the possibility of building transmission lines from Norway to the EU so that Norwegians can export their hydropower. and wind to Europe, in addition to its oil and gas resources, and in addition to

becoming

Europe's most important energy province, Norway is also likely to become one of the largest sources of minerals and rare earths in Europe and the world western.

It is also well known that the global push towards a green energy transition, largely led by European economies, will require large quantities of rare earths and metals. Earth's Elements to Keep It Running Rare earths, especially, are vital materials that are needed for electric vehicle batteries, smartphones, wind turbines, digital cameras, hard drives, and tons of other things that They are vital to powering modern 21st century life and growth, although unfortunately for Europe and the Western world, the vast majority of the world's proven rare earth reserves are currently dominated by China. China carries out an overwhelming 63% of all rare earth mining in the world, which is more than any other country combined, and China carries out an overwhelming 85% of all mining in the world.

Rare earth processing China controls about a third of the planet's proven rare earth reserves, followed by Vietnam, Russia and Brazil, after which there is a huge gap before Australia is next, far behind any of the four main ones and China has already been building its dominance over these. Rare earth resources Also similar to how Russia weaponizes its dominance over oil and gas In July 2023, China declared it was introducing new restrictions on the export of two metals that are critical to semiconductor manufacturing, gallium and germania. , in retaliation to US economic sanctions on China's semiconductor industry. China currently produces 98% of the world's gallium and gas. 68% of the world's germanium, so if China decides it can't have them, in reality it simply can't and although neither gallium nor germanium are rare earth metals, they are still critical to powering modern digital life and, hence China's export restrictions on them. were conceived as a clear threat that additional metals and minerals dominated by China could also become restricted in the future, but it was around the same time that a company called Norgay Mining in Norway suddenly made a surprise announcement in June 20123: nothing discovered by far the largest reserve of phosphate ever found in the world and it was there in southern Norway all this time.

The company has since estimated that this deposit contains around 70 billion tons of economically recoverable phosphate, literally in an instant. doubled the entire world's previously proven phosphate reserves, which were previously 71 billion tons. Put another way, this recent Norwegian discovery is so vast that it can satisfy the world's demand for phosphate alone for the next half century and completely undermined the previous dominance over phosphate previously enjoyed by Morocco, which controls approximately 50 thousand million tonnes of the resource, which was equivalent to about 70% of the world's proven reserves before June 2023 and then halved to only about 35% of the world's proven reserves after the discovery in Norway, before After the gigantic discovery in Norway, Morocco and China were the largest producers of phosphates and dominated the world market.

Phosphates are really important because they are a critical component. They are used in fertilizers and global food chains and, in smaller quantities, are also similarly used to produce digital devices and batteries for electric vehicles. Noray mining is not yet finished and they believe their huge phosphate discovery in southern Norway also contains huge amounts of metals such as titanium and vadium, as well as metals that are vital to the construction of everything from airplanes to computers and submarines, and more at this time the production of both metals is dominated by China, which produces approximately 36% of the world's titanium and more than half of the world's titanium. vadium, while vadium is produ, is 99% dominated by brick countries and practically all world production of the metal occurs in China, Russia, South Africa and Brazil.

This has meant that for a long time, the US and EU have had to rely on geopolitically fragile supply chains for their access to these raw materials that are vital to continue building planes, submarines and computers, and restrictions on exports of germanium and gallium by China show that China could in the future decide to introduce even more severe export restrictions on titanium and vadium. Furthermore, Norway's likely massive quantities of titanium and vadium could end up giving Europe and the West their strategic autonomy from China if Norg mining delivers, while Norway is now also set to become the newest and largest source of phosphates in the world, this ultimately means that, in addition to

becoming

Europe's largest source of oil and gas and a major source of renewable energy, Norway is also set to become Europe's largest source of many rare earth materials. which are crucial to modern technologies, the transition to green energy and AG culture, and Norway is completely undermining the previous dominance in all of these industries in Europe that had previously been enjoyed by more autocratic powers such as Russia and China.

Norway is giving Europeans the ability to rely more on the world's most democratic country for their raw materials and less on its historically large autocratic supplier countries like Russia, Algeria, Libya and the Gulf States, meaning Norway will likely continue to get richer. increasingly expanding their sovereign wealth fund to dominate more of the global stock and bond markets, while expanding their tax incentives to further electrify their vehicles and network so they can continue to sell more oil and gas to Europe to continue feeding its sovereign fund. Norway has basically discovered the geopolitical equivalent of the infinite money problem and they have wisely set themselves up for generations of prosperity for all Norwegian citizens in the years to come.

There is a huge amount of data that is used to produce these types of videos, whether they show how Norway and Russia compete for the oil and gas market in Europe, what Norway's wind and hydroelectric potentials are like, what Norway's potentials are like. Comparing small towns to larger city-states shows how China dominates the rare earth metals industry. The ability to visualize raw data like this on the map is exactly what makes learning this stuff so fascinating to me and that's why the Exploring Data Visually course is one of them. one of my favorite courses I've taken with this video sponsor shiny shiny is a fundamental learning platform that helps you learn by doing, they don't just give you a mountain of text and expect you to remember everything you read, they use interactive exercises to teach you the intuitive principles and then build these principles on each other so you can genuinely understand complex topics like data visualization and analysis, statistics, computer science, astrophysics and many others who really know how to teach to get results, which is why brilliant is perfect. for the kind of person who wants to learn because they love to learn, not because they are forced to, and best of all, with their mobile app and smaller courses, it really is possible to fit learning brilliantly into any schedule, without matter how.

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