Equinor Extends Norway Lng Outage by 10 Days

Equinor Extends Hammerfest LNG Outage by 10 Days

OSLO (Reuters) -Equinor has extended an ongoing outage at its Hammerfest LNG plant in Arctic northern Norway by 10 days to Jan. 19 as it continues to repair a failed compressor, the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.

The Hammerfest plant, also known as Melkoeya LNG, has the capacity to deliver about 6.5 billion cubic metres of gas per year, enough to supply about 6.5 million European homes, and accounts for roughly 5% of all Norwegian gas exports.

The company on Jan. 2 said that a compressor that re-injects CO2 stripped from the gas stream back into the ground had suffered an outage, and that repairs were expected to take one week.

But the compressor repair work was more extensive than first assumed, and the company had to wait for the delivery of new parts, a company spokesperson said.

Production at Europe's largest liquefied natural gas export facility is now expected to resume late in the evening on Jan. 19, according to an update posted on the Gassco regulatory web site.

Norway became Europe's largest supplier of natural gas following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with most of the Norwegian exports flowing via an offshore pipeline network in the North Sea.

The plant at Melkoeya receives gas from the Snoehvit field in the Barents Sea, some 143 km (89 miles) offshore. Its owners are Equinor, Petoro, TotalEnergies, Vaar Energi and Harbour Energy.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik and Nora Buli, editing by Stine Jacobsen, Jane Merriman and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)