Paper for the Built Ocean,
EAHN Thematic conference,
Porto, Portugal, 10-12 September 2025.
EAHN Thematic conference,
Porto, Portugal, 10-12 September 2025.
“Imagine ten million people. This is as many as live in London. Together, they weigh less than the concrete structure of the Statfjord B platform,”—enthusiastically noted the 1979 Statoil magazine feature dedicated to the new Norwegian oil mega-venture. Indeed, not only was the structure, which weighed 680,000 tons, the largest oil production platform in the world, but its construction was to become the “largest and the heaviest tow” the world has ever seen. Norwegian Contractors designed the enormous concrete project, and the company was also responsible for towing the structure through the Yrkjefjorden and mating it with a steel deck on-site. With a surface of more than 18,000 square meters and shafts towering 110 meters above the water’s surface, the structure was exposed to the impact of elements and sea currents. Despite its mega-scale, the project was only the tip of the iceberg of the Norwegian “oil adventure,” which, since 1969, dramatically transformed the Norwegian coastline and the natural environment of the North Sea. From the first discovery of the Ekofisk field, the petroleum industry expanded far into the sea and the seabed of the Norwegian continental shelf, with foreign and Norwegian business interests navigating the salty waters. Norwegian Contractors, an agglomeration of three engineering firms, Thor Furuholmen, Høyer Ellefsen and Engineer F. Selmer, established in 1973, was to physically mark the Norwegian conquest of the sea, developing and building concrete structures for the offshore industry. The company was responsible not only for the majority of concrete mega-scale projects for the oil industry from 1975 to 1995 but also for new housing developments across the ocean—in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, indirectly fueled by the oil profits.
Through selected case studies of projects by Norwegian Contractors, this contribution is particularly interested in the complex material, natural and business histories of these concrete mega-structures, populating the Norwegian continental shelf and extending far across the ocean. Based on a close reading of primary archival sources, newspaper and magazine discussions in Statoil magazine, the paper aims to reconstruct the complex global network of human and non-human actors engaged in Norwegian oil operations of the 1970s. The paper complicates the dualistic juxtaposition between the natural and man-made structures, instead considering them part of a global oil ecosystem which exists today. By doing so, the contribution begins to shed light on the entirely under-researched history of Norwegian oil architecture and its place within ecological discourse.