This has been a year of milestones – most notably the centennial celebrations of both Norway and Norsk Hydro. The most recent era in Norway’s history – the oil adventure – continues, and Norsk Hydro – not surprisingly – is the original Norwegian Oil Company.

And our efforts to facilitate Hydro’s celebration – as if they’ve had any problems doing so themselves this year – we’ve put together a series of articles that attempt to honour Hydro’s accomplishments, not only as an oil and gas company, but as a world-class company that holds promise for the next 100 years.

We want to congratulate Yara as well. Although Yara is most often described as having “demerged” from Hydro, there’s a strong argument for saying that Hydro just grew too large for the nest and flew away, taking the Hydro name with it on to the next generation.

So, we at the magazine want to say:

Once you read through the Hydro articles, you’ll see that in a real sense, this is a double issue of the magazine, so we’re offering quite a generous amount of other features as well.

This issue looks north, particularly to activities in the Barents Sea. The Snøhvit field, the LNG facility at Melkøya, and LNG in general are topics of focus. In addition to examination of the technical aspects of field and facilities development in the region, we have several points of view when it comes to financial analysis of project funding.

An emerging frontier area for the offshore E&P industry, by some estimates, the Arctic region holds up to 25 percent of the remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves in the world. Significant offshore discoveries have already been made in areas such as Eastern Canada, Northwest Russia and the Barents Sea. Russia’s Shtokman field alone is estimated to contain gas reserves of 3.2 trillion cubic metres.

Statoil has contributed a review of the subsea development of the Snøhvit field, concentrating on the challenges and discussing the current status, in which all structures, pipelines and umbilicals have been installed and tied-in according to plan in 2005 and that the remaining on-going seabed intervention activities will continue in 2006.

Other contributors discuss the LNG facilities on Melkøya, as well as the opportunities for Norwegian companies and suppliers to take part in the development of Shtokman field. The Barents appears to be the future of Norwegian activity.

And that’s not all. Other technical and financial items, as well as conference reviews, help to round out this double issue.

Finally, we here at the magazine are looking forward to seeing you at various events in the upcoming year and would like to wish you