History
In 1965 Hydro joined Elf Aquitaine and six other French companies to form Petronord to perform search for oil and gas in the North Sea. Hydro soon became a large company in the North Sea petroleum industry, and also became operator of a number of fields, the first being Oseberg.
Hydro acquired in the late 1980s the Mobil service stations in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, changing their name to Hydro. In 1995 Hydro merged its stations in Norway and Denmark with the Texaco, creating the joint venture HydroTexaco. The service station chain was sold in 2006 to Reitangruppen and the stations changed name to YX Energi. In 1999 Hydro acquired Norway's third largest petroleum company Saga Petroleum, who had major upstream operations primarily in Norway and the United Kingdom. The British operations were later sold.
The merger proposal with Statoil was announced in December 2006. Under the rules of the EEA the merger was approved by the European Union on May 3, 2007 and by the Norwegian Parliament on June 8, 2007. The Norwegian Government, the biggest shareholder in both Statoil and Norsk Hydro, holds 62.5% of the company. Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister of Norway commented that he views the merger as "the start of a new era. We are creating a global energy company and strengthening Norway’s oil and gas industry."
Read more about this topic: Hydro Oil & Gas
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)