Opportunities in abundance through the Nordics

February 2024 saw the Agent General take the sunshine of Western Australia to the frigid Fjords of Norway and Denmark, with a series of engagements focused on international education, talent attraction and decommissioning.

The engagements kicked off in Stavanger, Norway, where Agent General John Langoulant AO, Her Excellency Kerin Ayyalaraju, Australian Ambassador to Denmark, Norway and Iceland visited  Worley Rosenberg at their industrial site where they are building a new off-shore platform and refitting existing vessels.

The Agent General together with Dr Francis Norman, CEO of the Centre for Decommissioning Australia (CODA) also attended the 23rd North Sea Decommissioning Conference where it was highlighted that investment in traditional offshore energy project remain strong with projects suggests that $550 billon US per year will be spent in the sector until 2030. This combined with the requirement to decommission between 250-300 North Sea wells per year, means that there will be strong opportunities for WA based offshore businesses in the North Sea for years to come.

From decommissioning, the visit shifted gears to education with the office visiting the Tautdanning Student Fair in Oslo where we were provided deep insights into the Norwegian education market. This engagement revealed that Norwegian students are able to access government finance to help them live and study abroad, which is a significant enabler for European students looking to study in Australia. Insights such as these  are vitally important when it comes to developing how the office engages with markets across the region.

From Norway, the next stop was a business lunch in Copenhagen, co-hosted by Ambassador Ayyalaraju and the Agent General, with industry leaders from across the offshore sector. The lunch reception provided an opportunity for the participants to discuss ongoing and upcoming developments in offshore wind energy, hydrogen, education and decommissioning of common interest between Denmark and Western Australia.

This was supplemented by a highly productive meeting with Copenhagen Energy who are one of the organisations proposing to develop offshore wind farms in Western Australia and are actively looking to expand their presence in Western Australia, to take advantage of opportunities from the recently announced offshore wind zone in WA’s southwest.

Moving down the skills pipeline, the team had an enlightening afternoon with Copenhagen Capacity, Copenhagen’s inbound investment agency. However, unlike many of their counterparts Copenhagen Capacity also has talent attraction mandate, with Copenhagen facing similar workforce challenges as WA. In addition to owning Copenhagen’s global talent attraction campaign, Copenhagen Capacity also focus on assisting local businesses become migration ready.  Insights gained from this will be vital as WA continue to refine its global capability attraction program, being spearheaded from the London Office.

Following the success of this visit the Office will look further to embed relationships in the back half of 2024 with attendance at Offshore Europe in Stavanger and targeted education engagements to align with the commencement of the northern hemisphere’s school year.