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
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—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)