Each year the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway receives a number of consent applications in respect of Section 25 of the Regulations concerning management and the duty to provide information in the petroleum activities and at certain onshore facilities (the Management Regulations).
The consents that relate to offshore petroleum activities are sent to the Norwegian Environment Agency for assessment of environmental factors that affect the case in question. Only parts of the consent application are relevant for the Norwegian Environment Agency's case processing. The Agency often receives requests to inspect the consent applications and, in these cases, needs to process the entire consent application and not just those sections that they themselves will respond to. This entails unnecessary extra work for the Agency.
On this basis, and on the initiative of the Norwegian Environment Agency, we are asking the companies to separate out into an annex to the application those parts of the consent application that are relevant to the Norwegian Environment Agency's case processing.
What is an identical letter?
An identical letter is a communication with the same wording sent to all or selected groups of players in the petroleum sector, depending on whom the content is relevant for.
These communications can provide:
- guidance on regulatory provisions
- requests for certain measures to be implemented
- other important information.
An identical letter does not have the status of an order, and is accordingly not formally binding.
We may follow up an identical letter with more formal action if it fails to have the desired effect.