Equinor's Hammerfest LNG Plant Faces Temporary Shutdown
OSLO (Reuters) -Equinor's Hammerfest LNG plant in Arctic northern Norway has suffered an unexpected outage due to a compressor failure, halting all output for one week, the company said on Thursday.
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.
An Equinor spokesperson said a compressor that re-injects CO2 stripped from the gas stream back into the ground had suffered an outage, and that the company had decided to halt production.
"The repair is expected to take a week," the spokesperson said.
Production at Europe's largest liquefied natural gas export facility is expected to resume late in the evening on Jan. 9, according to a statement 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 Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Terje Solsvik and Kevin Liffey)
