Bloomberg said Sweden’s Lundin Petroleum and Norway’s Statoil ended talks on jointly building an oil terminal in Norway’s Arctic, dealing a blow to the nation’s hopes of creating a hub for Barents Sea fields in an effort to revive its falling output.

“Any discussions with Statoil from our perspective is difficult at this stage, because we can’t really help them,” Ashley Heppenstall said by phone yesterday. “We need to do more drilling on Alta and Gohta and to first of all understand how much we have.”