Darkening clouds over Norway's oil industry are pushing prices higher with Brent trading at $78.39 a barrel in morning Asian trade and WTI at $74.02 a barrel.

Wage negotiations with trade unions in Norway fell through and platform workers are due to strike today, disrupting production at at least one field in the North Sea.

This disruption has added to the slump in Libyan production, an outage in

Growing oil production in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Norway will keep the world oversupplied despite OPEC's cut efforts, the International Energy Agency said in its latest five-year forecast for the industry.

New crude supply from the U.S. will alone be enough to meet 80% of the growth in demand. The rest will come from Canada, Brazil, and Norway, the IEA said.

This raises the question,

Norway has awarded a record-high number of offshore oil and gas exploration licenses, at 75, of which 45 in the North Sea and 22 in the Norwegian Sea. The rest were in the Barents Sea, in the Arctic.

The winners included Statoil and Aker BP, and supermajors Shell, Total, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips. The total list of winners included 34 companies.

Norway is eager to develop its untapped oil and gas

There's no mistake in the headline: Norway's sovereign wealth fund, built from crude oil revenues, is now beginning to divest its stakes in oil and gas companies.

The move is a pragmatic one. The $1-trillion fund is used for a lot of projects in one of Europe's greenest countries and it is now hedging against stock volatility in the oil sector resulting from oil price movements.

Stakes to be

Crude oil rebounded yesterday as the bewilderment caused by Britain’s vote to exit the Eu started to subside and as the threat of a strike in Norway’s oil industry reared its head.

Brent crude closed at $48.61 a barrel, up 3%, after touching an intraday high of $48.58. WTI gained 3.3% to close at $47.85, after spiking to $47.81.