The Storting debated petroleum HES on 12th June 2018. The overall impression from the debate is that the government has very few, if any, ambitions for petroleum HES other than “keep business as usual”.

All parties focus on the HES situation for employees on construction and maintenance vessels, the government will let the parties solve the issues, whereas the Labour-led opposition wants the government to take a more active lead.

But there are also other issues which may create challenges, for instance the significant changes of industrial actors, whereby 4 or 5 of the major international oil companies are withdrawing from the Norwegian sector over the last couple of years. This may affect significantly the way the whole sector will operate in the years to come. And there are issues in relation to possible future extensive use of unmanned installations.

It would have been better if the government was more focused on future challenges, the impression from the White paper and the debate in the Storting is that the government is quite relaxed in these matters. A relaxed approach is insufficient in these matters, according to what colleagues in NTNU formulated some years ago: Safety must be created and recreated every day. There are no final solutions.