A Barents Veteran is 80 on Monday.

Kåre was born in Kabelvåg, Lofoten in Northern Norway on September 13th, 1930.

Kåre has been involved with the Barents region even before the phrase was coined. But Kåre has always been involved with highly visible and technically challenging projects.

As an employee of Noratom AS was he involved with the construction of Norway’s first nuclear reactor, Haldenreaktoren. Within the same field he spent more than 3 years in Belgium constructing a processing and storage facility for radioactive waste.

Kåre started his long relationship with Kværner in 1969, and in 1971, together with Kristian Walentin and a handful of colleagues, started Kværner Engineering in a villa in Lysaker, Kværner Engineering was to be a forerunner for the now world-renowned Norwegian Offshore Oil & Gas Technology.

In 1981 he was engaged by Norway’s Department for Trade and Shipping to successfully upright the Platform Alexander Kielland after the tragic accident in the North Sea.

After that the challenges stood in line; as Director for Kværner Egersund he managed to turn around a struggling community to bustling activity and full orderbooks.

Then to run Kværner Bruk in Lodalen, the very center of the then nearly 150 year old industrial stronghold.

But in 1989 new challenges appeared, Kåre left Kværner and went to Kirkenes as Director of Kimek AS, only to see that Kværner followed and bought the controlling interest in Kimek. This was exciting times, perestroika and opening of borders. Kåre was one of the first to visit Zvezdochka in 1990, to discuss industrial cooperation with the General Director Nikolai Kalistratov, which is today GD of Sevmash.

On the 13. September 1993 it was time to open his own consulting company concentrating his activities towards Russia and what was now officially the Barents region, and the Barents cooperation, established earlier the same year.

And the following 17 years has been filled with putting into action the very idea of the Barents cooperation, and is still going on; during his 80th year Kåre has been using his expertise to support further cooperation for Kirkenes and other clients, at OTC in Houston in May, Neftegaz 2010 in Moscow in June, and ONS in Stavanger in August. Full speed ahead.

Happy birthday Kåre!