Norwegian oil strike grows
Labor dispute in No. 3 exporter widens, drains 375,000 barrels per day from country's production.
June 22, 2004: 8:35 AM EDT
OSLO (Reuters) - A five-day strike by Norwegian oil workers widened Tuesday to knock about 375,000 barrels per day (bpd) off Norway's 3 million bpd output, with unions and employers saying the dispute was deadlocked.
The 60,000 bpd Ekofisk Bravo platform in the North Sea closed overnight, adding to 315,000 bpd already cut by the strike for the world's No. 3 exporter, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia.
"We shut down about midnight," ConocoPhillips (COP: Research, Estimates) spokesman Ingvar Solberg said of the halt at Ekofisk Bravo.
He said the strike also halted injection of 425,000 bpd of water from the Ekofisk K platform into the subsea reservoir to keep up pressure and force out oil across the Ekofisk field, where overall production is usually 350,000 bpd.
Solberg said it was not clear how far the lack of water injection might brake output.
The strike, by about 200 workers over pension rights and union demands for tighter restrictions on temporary labor, began Friday and closed Statoil's 240,000 bpd Snorre field and the related 75,000 bpd Vigdis field Saturday.
Exxon Mobil says that its 80,000 bpd Ringhorne field is likely to close late Wednesday when an extra 16 workers join the stoppage, raising the impact of the strike to 455,000 bpd.
Both the Federation of Oil Workers' Trade Unions (OFS) and the Norwegian Oil Industry Association (OLF) employers' group said there were no contacts to try to resolve the strike.
"It's hard to say what the next move will be," OFS leader Terje Nustad told Reuters. He has said that the union will consider a further widening of the strike.
Labor and Social Affairs Minister Dagfinn Hoybraaten, appointed by coincidence in a cabinet reshuffle Friday after the strike began, has said he has no plans to invoke emergency laws to stop the strike "given its current extent."
Oil is the backbone of the Norwegian economy, accounting for about 20 percent of gross domestic product, and past governments have often ordered workers back to platforms when strikes halt all or a large share of output.
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Nustad said he believed the current center-right government would be reluctant to order mandatory arbitration. "It would take a lot for them to decide that," he said.
"We are assessing the situation closely, but there is no contact with the union for the time being," OLF spokesman Tom Gederoe said.
The employers' big reserve weapon is to order a lockout, perhaps gambling that the government would step in to halt the conflict rather than risk a full shutdown of Norway's output. |
