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Brief history of the country
Sweden (the Kingdom of Sweden) is part of Fennoscandia bordering Norway and Denmark (connected by a bridge) to the west, and Finland, along with the Gulf of Bothnia and Baltic Sea, to the east.
Known as Norsemen, Germanic people inhabited Sweden since prehistoric times. Vikings lived in the area to the 11th century after which Sweden began to unify as a Kingdom albeit with competition from other Nordic kingdoms.
In 1319, Sweden and Norway united, joined in 1397 by Denmark in the Kalmar Union which lasted until 1523. From 1611 Sweden expanded to form the Swedish Empire, conquering parts of Russia and northeast Europe. An attempt to invade Russia led to the disastrous Battle of Poltava in 1709. It went on to lose much of its empire in the 1721 Treaty of Nystad. Russia took Finland in 1809.
The country fought its last war in 1814 when Norway was forced into a union. This was peacefully dissolved in 1905. Sweden maintained neutrality and managed to keep out of both World Wars, although was generally under German influence.
After World War 2 it has progressively built an industrialised economy but with agriculture remaining important. It joined the EU in 1995 after a fiscal crisis but rejected the Euro. Recently it has seen mass immigration.
Oil and gas summary
Sweden is situated in the geographical region of Fennoscandia; geologically the Baltic Shield. It is separated from Norway on the west by the Scandinavian mountains. Southern and eastern Sweden comprises a flatter eroded region.
The Baltic Shield is the exposed northwest segment of the East European Craton composed mostly of metamorphic rocks and granites with many recent periods of glaciation and erosion.
Sweden has negligible volumes of identified indigenous oil or gas resources. For a period from 1974 the country produced very small volumes of oil from a series of fields with Ordovician reservoirs on northern Gotland; an island in the Baltic Sea. Although total output has never surpassed 250 bbls per day, small volumes may continue to be extracted intermittently. Onshore biogenic gas deposits are also being explored near the coast and shale gas shale potential is present although this is unlikely to be developed.
Sweden has not produced oil or gas from its offshore waters and Globalshift believes it is unlikely to achieve any offshore production in the future.
SWEDEN
Map and National Flag
STOCKHOLM
From Stadshuset
Northwest Europe
Capital
Population
Land area (sq kms)
Oil prod (000s b/d)
Gas prod (bcm/yr)
Oil cons (000s b/d)
Gas cons (bcm/yr)
Stockholm
9.5 mm
450,295
None
None
307
0.9
Government
Sweden is a monarchy. Although its head of state, the role of the monarch is limited to ceremonial functions.
Legislative power is vested in the 349-member unicameral Riksdag with elections held every 4 years.
The Mining Inspectorate issues permits for exploration and mining. The Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) is the agency concerned with data on rocks, soil and groundwater.
Gripen Oil & Gas, a private company, is focusing on E and P in Sweden with a portfolio of exploration acreage on Gotland, Östergötland and Öland.
Geology and History of Exploration
During the Palaeozoic a continental collision between Scandinavia and Greenland created the Scandinavian Mountains of Caledonian age. It underwent an extensional collapse during the Devonian.
Further extension then occurred at the Scandinavian margin during Permian and Mesozoic time, followed by continental breakup. The mountains were partially eroded and uplifted again while the depression, currently expressed by the Baltic Sea, developed accumulating continental sediments that underlie the southern and eastern coastal and offshore areas of Sweden. Globalshift recognises that the sedimentary fill in the western Baltic Sea was not conducive to creation of a petroleum system.
Oil has been drilled in the island of Gotland off the mainland of southeastern Sweden. Gotland is made up of a sequence of limestones and shales of Silurian age, dipping to the southeast and overlying a thick Ordovician sequence. It was deposited in a shallow sea on the edge of an equatorial continent which shallowed as carbonates and terrestrial sediments filled the basin. Reef growth began although some sandstones are present in the youngest rocks towards the south. These sands were bars that built up close to the shore line. The limestones are weathered into karsts.
The oil in Gotland, produced since 1974, occurs in the porous and fractured limestone reefs and to some extent in the sandstones. Further undrilled reef structures have been identified on seismic.The oil is reservoired in Silurian and Ordovician limestone reefs at depths of between 200m and 800m. Flow rates of between 18 to 130 bbls per day of light oil have been achieved and shows of oil have also been reported in Cambrian sandstones. The oil must be pumped to surface and the wells are drilled using a lower cost, lower impact, micro-drill method developed in Sweden in the 1970s.
Gas is also present in alum shales deposited in Cambro-Ordovician times in an anoxic inland sea in the area of Östergötland and Öland. Alum-shale, with its high content of organic material, can be broken down by bacteria to produce biogenic methane.
History - A number of wells were drilled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Oil was discovered on the island of Gotland on trend with fields discovered in offshore Poland but with older reservoirs. Wells were drilled through to the early 1990s followed by a long hiatus. A few wells were then drilled from 2008.
Production began in 1974 with a total peak output of near 250 bbls per day reached in 1984 from around 20 accumulations. However, output since 1990 has been negligible with most of the 30 or so producing wells exhausted. Overall around 700,000 bbls of oil have been produced.
In 2014 about 2,000 km of 2D seismic was digitised, reprocessed and interpreted by Gripen Oil and Gas resulting in the identification of over 20 new drillable prospects. However, the play is high risk.
Horizontal drilling may improve the economics but the reservoirs can be rather shallow making successful drilling difficult. Sales gas has never been produced in Sweden but Gripen has explored the potential for shallow sediments of the Alum Shale to yield biogenic shale gas. The presence of gas in Swedish alum shales is often found in connection with the drilling of water wells or boreholes for geothermal heating.