Saga Petroleum
Norwegian upstream petroleum company acquired by Norsk Hydro in 1999
Saga Petroleum ASA was a Norwegian upstream petroleum company established in 1972 that was acquired by Norsk Hydro in 1999. In October 2007 it was made part of Statoil. The company was the only fully private oil company in Norway. It had partial ownership of 60 oil field licenses and was operator of 18. Saga had an international profile, including major operations on the British continental shelf as well as minor operations in Angola, Indonesia, Libya and Namibia.
History
Saga Petroleum was founded in 1972 as a private initiative based on a political wish to have three Norwegian oil companies. The company started up at the same time as Statoil and was part of the three-company model with one state owned company (Statoil), one semi-private company (Norsk Hydro) and one fully private company (Saga). The three Norwegian oil companies were to ensure that petroleum competence was established in Norway.
Among the largest fields Saga operated were the Snorre oil field and the Tordi, Varg and Vigdis oil fields. Not long before the merger Saga had acquired the Kuwait based Santa Fe Exploration for US$1.23 billion.
The public source identifies “Saga Petroleum” as norwegian upstream petroleum company acquired by Norsk Hydro in 1999. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Saga, Petroleum and Norwegian.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1189623. VIAF identifies the subject as 3463149368837385980004. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1999 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saga Petroleum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.