Equinor extends Norway LNG Outage by 10 Days
Equinor announced in a Wednesday regulatory filing that it has extended the outage of its Hammerfest LNG facility in Arctic Northern Norway by 10 more days, to January 19, as they continue to repair a faulty compressor.
The Hammerfest plant (also known as Melkoeya LNG) has the ability to deliver approximately 6.5 billion cubic meters of gas each year. This is enough to provide about 6.5 millions European homes and accounts for about 5% of Norwegian gas exports.
On Jan. 2, the company reported that an outage had occurred in a compressor which re-injects the CO2 removed from the gas stream into the ground. Repairs were expected to last one week.
The reason for the delay was not immediately apparent.
A spokesperson for Equinor did not respond immediately to a comment request.
According to an update on the Gassco website, production at Europe's biggest liquefied gas export facility will resume in the late evening of Jan. 19.
Norway will be Europe's biggest natural gas supplier following the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022. Most of Norway's exports will flow via a pipeline network offshore in the North Sea.
Melkoeya's plant receives its gas from the Snoehvit Field in the Barents sea, about 143 km away. Equinor owns the plant, as do TotalEnergies and Vaar Energi. (Reporting and editing by Stine Jacqueman and Jane Merriman, with Nora Buli and Terje Solsvik)
(source: Reuters)
