ABSTRACT
As the Norwegian Continental Shelf is approaching a status as a mature oil province, the issue of continued presence of transnational oil companies is becoming more pressing. There are several factors that make the presence of these companies attractive. It is important to understand the factors explaining transnational oil companies' localisation decisions in order to be able to ensure the presence of both large oil companies and smaller companies specialising in marginal fields and tail production. An analytical approach to this decision problem will be to use portfolio analysis to arrive at the portfolio of projects with greatest combined present value for the company, with consideration to fixed costs and resource and capital constraints. Materiality implies that projects must be of a certain minimum size in order to be interesting investment objects for transnational companies. To shed some light on this issue the authors exploits two theoretical approaches – the theory of industrial clusters and materiality theories.
