Another year, another hiccup at Hammerfest LNG. Equinor’s crown jewel in Arctic Norway is down again, this time thanks to a compressor failure, according to a regulatory statement from Gassco. Output has screeched to a halt until Jan. 9, leaving Europe’s largest LNG export plant offline for a week—because, apparently, the Arctic air isn’t the only thing freezing up.
Hammerfest LNG, or Melkoeya if you prefer its less industrial moniker, packs a punch, delivering enough gas to heat 6.5 million European homes. That’s a hefty 5% of Norway’s gas exports, which is no small potatoes given Norway’s top-dog status in Europe’s gas game post-Russia’s Gazprom tantrum in 2022.
This outage joins a growing list of Hammerfest’s “incidents.” From a gas leak last April to a fire that sidelined operations for 18 months starting in 2020, reliability hasn’t exactly been the plant’s calling card.
Still, Equinor and its co-owners—TotalEnergies, Vaar Energi, Petoro, and Harbour Energy—press on, with the Snoehvit field feeding the beast.
The Hammerfest LNG plant at Melkoeya draws gas from the Snoehvit field in the Barents Sea, and has the capacity to deliver about 6.5 billion cubic meters of gas per year, enough to supply about 6.5 million European homes. Exports from Hammerfest represent about 5% of all Norwegian natural gas exports.
In late September, Norway restarted its Kaarstoe processing plant after it was down three weeks for “complex and extensive maintenance”.
Norway is the single biggest provider of natural gas to Europe after Russia’s Gazprom cut off most of its supply to the EU after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
The Hammerfest LNG shutdown comes as winter heating season is in full swing.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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Publish date : 2025-01-02 08:30:00
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