How the War in Ukraine Securitised Norwegian Energy
What 29,000 parliamentary speeches reveal about political change
Norway’s political economy has few parallels. Its vast oil and gas reserves are controlled by the state, and their revenues finance one of the world’s most comprehensive welfare systems. Yet alongside its reliance on fossil fuel exports, the country has long cultivated an identity as a climate leader, using its abundant hydropower to decarbonise much of the domestic economy—including the petroleum industry itself. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this balancing act gave way to a new priority: energy security. As the disruption of Russian gas flows triggered an energy crisis in Europe, Norway rapidly emerged as the continent’s largest supplier. Amid soaring household costs and threats to offshore infrastructure, Norwegian energy was no longer seen as just an economic asset, but as a matter of geopolitical stability.
To examine this shift, I applied structural topic modelling (STM) to 29,000 parliamentary speeches delivered in the year before and after the invasion. By identifying latent themes in the Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset, STM captures the country’s political agenda between February 2021 and February 2023. Within this period, the energy domain emerges as four distinct topics. Tracked week by week using an interrupted time series design, these topics show how both Norway’s oil and gas industry and its power system were securitised in the wake of the war.
From Transition to Production
The energy crisis led to a massive resurgence in Norway’s petroleum sector. After a pandemic that had dealt a severe blow to its oil revenues, the country published its Climate Action Plan in January 2021, outlining efforts to accelerate its transition away from fossil-fuel dependence. Citing reduced demand for oil and gas, the white paper emphasises the need to redirect petroleum expertise toward low-emission technologies such as hydrogen development and carbon storage. As Norway ramped up its gas supply to Europe in 2022, petroleum revenues reached NOK 1,457 billion, far above any previous year.
In the model, two debates reflect this tension in Norway’s energy domain. Each topic is a statistical distribution of terms that frequently appear together in the data, capturing the policies and framings that define a given debate. Climate and Transition centres on decarbonisation commitments and projects, Oil and Gas on industry, development, and supply in the deeply institutionalised petroleum sector.
The war in Ukraine marked a clear turning point in the country’s petroleum politics. Climate debates were steadily gaining momentum leading up to early 2022, reaching around 1.8% of the parliamentary agenda. This trajectory reversed sharply after the invasion, when Norwegian gas exports became critical to the continent’s energy security. The previous paradigm of transition planning quickly lost ground as Norway assumed its new role as a ‘stable and reliable supplier’ to Europe, with debates shifting to production capacity and exploration.
Crisis at Home
While the war resulted in record-high revenues, it also confronted Norway with unprecedented domestic energy costs. Electricity prices began to rise steeply already in late 2021, driven by hydropower droughts and new interconnectors to the UK and Germany. When the war broke out, these interconnectors exposed Norway to the energy crisis that followed. By 2022, prices had nearly tripled from the five-year average. In a country long accustomed to cheap hydropower, the sudden spike in household costs escalated to a political emergency.
The crisis materialised as two interconnected topics. Electricity Prices focuses on the drastic increase in the cost of living and the support measures introduced to contain it. Renewable Energy covers capacity expansion and concerns over Norway’s integration with European power markets—a development that came under heavy criticism during the crisis.
Here, the time series shows the emergence of two new policy problems in the Norwegian parliament. Both debates were virtually non-existent in early 2021, before rising rapidly in response to the shock. By the end of the year, Electricity Prices had become the most salient topic in the model by far, amplified by the rollout of a major support package for households. The topics stabilised as major issues after the invasion, each occupying around 2% of the agenda. Alongside the surge in gas exports, the energy crisis introduced a domestic frontier to Norway’s energy domain, framed around affordability and resilience.
A New Equilibrium
Historically, Norway’s climate policies have played an instrumental role in legitimising continued petroleum production, reconciling it with both domestic emissions targets and European market demands. The war in Ukraine pushed Norwegian energy politics into a new equilibrium, in which the state was suddenly responsible for both securing gas flows to the continent and shielding domestic households from price volatility. Both challenges have persisted. Electricity prices remain well above pre-crisis levels, with energy affordability—rather than climate—at the centre of the 2025 election. On the supply side, infrastructure protection and expanded national control have become the new operational standard, as Norwegian gas now accounts for around a third of Europe’s consumption.
While the increase in export revenues has bought Norway some time, the energy crisis illuminated several constraints in its inevitable transition away from a hydrocarbon economy. Domestically, the saturation of hydropower capacity is a major bottleneck to further decarbonisation, while controversies surrounding wind power projects and waterway licensing have increasingly made renewable expansion politically costly. The country’s strong tradition of land rights and conservation also collides with the question of deepening EU integration, which many see as an essential condition for a decarbonised Norwegian economy. As Europe turns to renewables and global oil demand wanes, these tensions will increasingly shape the country’s politics and the foundations of its welfare state.
This article is adapted from my MA dissertation at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.