Oslo

COST cuts are painful, but for Norway's oil industry making every penny count has also yielded a surprising production windfall.

Thanks to improvements from cheaper, faster drilling to greater regularity in the operation of production platforms, producers pumped 85,000 barrels a day more crude than expected during the past two years, or 6 per cent above forecast, according to industry regulator, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD). And it gets better: this week the NPD raised its output forecast for the 2017 to 2020 period by 8 per cent, an average of 110,000 barrels a day.