Equinor's Hammerfest liquefied natural gas plant closed for a week due to compressor failure

Equinor announced on Thursday that its Hammerfest LNG facility in Arctic Northern Norway suffered an unexpected outage because of a compressor failure. The company said the plant's output was halted for a week.

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.

A spokesperson for Equinor said that an Equinor compressor, which re-injects the CO2 removed from the gas stream into the ground, had experienced a malfunction and the company decided to stop production.

The spokesperson stated that "the repair will take about a week."

According to a statement on the Gassco website, production at Europe's biggest liquefied gas export facility will resume in the late evening of Jan. 9.

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 Terje Sollsvik, Kevin Liffey and Nerijus Adomiaitis)

(source: Reuters)