Norway's Barents bounce

The death of Arctic exploration has been greatly exaggerated—in Norway, at least

The words frontier and Arctic have been anathema to most cost-conscious explorers since the oil price headed south, so Norway's efforts to bring the two together by trying to entice drillers to the Barents Sea carried some risks. That this effort has met with some success shows Norway is not your typical oil province—and a fresh discovery is likely to provide a springboard for further activity. Lundin Petroleum's Filicudi discovery in the western Barents Sea, announced in February, may not be the biggest, with a gross resource estimate of 35m-100m barrels of oil equivalent. But its location in the PL533 block is on trend with the Statoil-operated Johan Castberg discovery, just 40km north-wes