Seabed Mineral Security as a part of Norway's Total Defence: Lessons from the Petroleum Sector

Norway's total defence concept is built on a distributed responsibility model in which public authorities and private companies jointly contribute to national resilience. In the petroleum sector, this model has gradually evolved to include explicit security obligations, particularly after the Nord Stream sabotage, when gas transport to Europe was designated a fundamental national function under the Norwegian Security Act. This legal anchoring has clarified roles and risk ownership and enabled more coordinated responses to hybrid threats targeting subsea energy infrastructure. In contrast, the emerging seabed minerals sector lacks comparable institutional arrangements. Although the regulatory framework addresses safety, working environment, and environmental risks, security remains largely implicit and weakly integrated. This gap is noteworthy given the sector's vulnerability to grey-zone activities, cyber-physical sabotage, and geopolitical competition over critical raw materials. This paper compares governance developments in the mature petroleum sector with the nascent seabed minerals domain to examine how lessons learned can inform proactive security integration. The analysis shows that intentional threats cannot be governed through safety-based regulation alone; effective management of hybrid threats requires early state involvement, clear role allocation, and mechanisms for information sharing and civil-military cooperation. The petroleum experience also demonstrates that retrofitting security regulation onto established safety regimes creates friction, including classification barriers, uneven access to threat information, and coordination challenges across agencies and operators. We conclude that security must be designed into the seabed minerals framework from the outset to avoid similar governance gaps.

Keywords: Seabed Minerals, Petroleum, Security, Regulation, Responsibility, Total defence.