In recent days, the energy giant Statoil has confirmed the deaths of four of the five company employees missing since Islamist militants attacked a gas installation this month at In Amenas, near the Libyan border. Few in Norway held out more than the slimmest hope for the last missing employee.

This sparsely populated region on the North Sea coast, where on winter afternoons children skate on frozen ponds nestled among snow-covered evergreens, might seem to have little in common with the barren Sahara. But the flare of burning gas in the distance at the Mongstad refinery, Norway’s largest, serves as a reminder of why four people from the area found themselves among the 17 Statoil employees at the Algerian facility when it was ambushed.

Since Phillips Petroleum struck oil in 1969 in the Ekofisk field in the North Sea, more and more Norwegians from this coastal region have passed up traditional jobs like fisherman and sailor to become the mechanics and engineers powering the petroleum industry — not just in Norway but also from the Gulf of Mexico to Nigeria.

Austrheim’s mayor, Per Leroy, 55, understands just how much the petroleum industry has meant to the region and the country. “Go back 100 years and the area north of Bergen was one of the poorest in Europe,” Mr. Leroy said. “Now it’s one of the richest.”

Statoil was founded in 1972 through an act of Parliament. It is run as a profit-making company, though the government maintains a roughly two-thirds stake in the business. While many European countries are struggling under growing debt burdens, Norway, thanks to its petroleum reserves, has a sovereign wealth fund with an estimated $700 billion to protect its future.

Norwegians enjoy universal health care, subsidized public universities that are almost free to attend and a generous social security system. Norwegians have a higher-than-average life expectancy, breathe cleaner air and are more satisfied with their lives than the residents of most industrialized countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. World Bank figures show that Norway’s economic output of $98,102 per capita in 2011 was more than twice the $48,112 in the United States.

But workers who take their skills from oil platforms on the North Sea to projects in unstable countries are exposing themselves to new risks, a reality thrust into sharp relief by the militants’ assault on In Amenas, an ordeal that drew a powerful counterattack by the Algerian military. In the end, at least 37 foreign hostages were killed.

“You are not just a traveler in the oil business, sometimes you are traveling in an invisible war zone,” said Tom Hella, 35, an oil-drilling operator from the nearby town of Radoy whose career has taken him from Angola to Azerbaijan. But after what happened in Algeria, he said: “The missis just said that that’s it. After this she won’t let me travel anymore.”

That conversation, writ large, is taking place across Norwegian society. Helge Ryggvik, a historian and oil researcher, told the daily Dagsavisen that Norwegian oil companies should withdraw from risky countries.

Even if they are willing to take the chance, the increased security costs of doing business may keep safety-conscious companies away. Henrik Thune, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, specializing in energy and the Middle East, said, “Western companies will pull out and other countries’ companies, like Chinese, Indian and Russian companies, will replace them.”

In April 2010, Russian and Norwegian leaders finally resolved a 40-year dispute over how to divide the Barents Sea and part of the Arctic Ocean, opening another frontier in oil and natural gas exploration. Newer technologies have meant that existing reserves will remain productive for years to come, while recent discoveries have increased optimism that local production will remain strong for decades.

“They find the Norwegian continental shelf attractive because the political risk is very small,” said Thina Margrethe Saltvedt, an oil analyst at Nordea Markets in Oslo. “Maybe they won’t pull out, but they don’t have to go abroad as they did before,” Ms. Saltvedt said. “We’re still little people in the big world.”

Statoil had already announced last year that it would sell its stake in a giant oil field in Iraq to the Russian company Lukoil.

The Algerian episode has not been as shocking for Norwegian society as the massacre of 69 people in 2011 at a political youth camp at Utoya Island along with a bombing in Oslo that killed eight. That was a trauma from which the nation is still recovering. But those killings, horrifying as they were, did not raise the kinds of policy questions that the events in Algeria do for a country with an outsize stake in the world of energy.

“If we have enough oil, there shouldn’t be reason to send people over there,” said Kim Vagenes, 22, who works at a hardware store here in Austrheim. The municipality, with a population of 2,850, is the hometown of two of the oil workers confirmed dead. “Of course, the oil companies want as much oil as they can get.”

As a young man Mr. Leroy, the mayor of Austrheim, assumed he would go into the shipping business, but construction on the Mongstad refinery began just after he finished high school. “The optimism came back to the people,” he said. “They moved back, built new houses.”

Thanks to the petroleum industry, the unemployment rate in Austrheim averages less than 2 percent. The development has quite literally connected this part of the region of Hordaland to the world. It used to take three hours by boat to get to the regional hub of Bergen. Now it takes an hour by car, using bridges built with oil money. At the airport in Bergen, advertisements promote jobs that “take the next step in Bergen’s oil and gas success” and promise to help customers “maximize their reservoirs’ performance.”

Politicians and business leaders have thus far taken a strong stance, saying they will not be intimidated by acts of violence. Helge Kristoffersen, a managing director at the recruiting firm Mosaique, said that challenging, well-paying job openings would continue to attract candidates.

“Some may shy away from assignments in countries with high risk for a while to come,” Mr. Kristoffersen said, “but we quickly forget.”

Chris Cottrell contributed reporting from Berlin.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/world/europe/norway-debates-overseas-ventures-after-algeria-siege.html?partner=rss&emc=rss