Anders Opedal (born 4. May 1968)[1] is the incumbent chief executive officer, and former chief operating officer, of Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor.
He joined the company in 1997 having previously worked for Schlumberger and Baker Hughes.[2][3][4][5][6] He stepped down from the COO position and became Equinor's country manager in Brazil in January 2017.[7][8][9] On 10 August 2020, Equinor announced Opedal's selection as the company's next chief executive officer, from 2 November 2020 onwards.[10] Opedal holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University and an engineering degree from NTH.
Equinor ASA (formerly Statoil and StatoilHydro) is a Norwegian state-owned multinational energy company headquartered in Stavanger. It is primarily a petroleum company, operating in 36 countries with additional investments in renewable energy. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Equinor was ranked as the 169th-largest public company in the world.[3] The company has about 20,200 employees.[2]
The current company was formed by the 2007 merger of Statoil with the oil and gas division of Norsk Hydro.[4] As of 2017, the Government of Norway is the largest shareholder with 67% of the shares, while the rest is public stock. The ownership interest is managed by the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy.[5] The company is headquartered and led from Stavanger, while most of their international operations are currently led from Fornebu, outside Oslo.
The name Equinor was adopted in 2018 and is formed by combining "equi", the root for words such as equal, equality and equilibrium, and "nor", indicating that the company is of Norwegian origin.[6] The Norwegian meaning of the former name Statoil is State-Oil, indicating that the oil company is state owned.[7]
