Giant natural gas producer to refocus on core activities

ASSEN – The Netherlands Oil Company (NAM) plans to refocus itself on a few core activities: producing natural gas at its Groningen field, underground storage of natural gas at the Grijpskerk and Langelo locations, the possible upstart of the mothballed Schoonebeek oil field and the storage of CO2. In principle, NAM wants to sell off small oil and natural gas fields which could be operated more economically by smaller firms. NAM sees its workforce dwindling from the current 1800 to a maximum of 600, according to its plan ‘NAM 2020.’ A joint venture owned by Shell and ExxonMobil, NAM was founded sixty years ago and has an annual natural gas production of 50 billion cubic metres. In recent years, the firm introduced a number of innovations to increase viability of small fields and to extract a higher percentage of raw commodities from its wells.