Norwegian energy major, Equinor has extended an ongoing outage at its Hammerfest LNG plant in northern Norway by 10 days, to 19th January.
The cause of the outage was a failed compressor, which is now under repair, Equinor said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.
Hammerfest, also known as Melkoeya LNG, has the capacity to deliver about 6.5 bill cu m of gas per year, enough to supply about 6.5 mill European homes, and accounts for roughly 5% of the total Norwegian gas exports.
On 2nd January, the company revealed 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 a week.
But the compressor repair work was more extensive than first thought, and Equinor had to wait for the delivery of new parts, a company spokesperson said.
Production at Europe's largest LNG export facility is now expected to resume late in the evening on 19h January, 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 its exports flowing via a North Sea offshore pipeline network.
Melkoeya receives gas from the Snoehvit field in the Barents Sea, some 143 km offshore.
Its stakeholders are Equinor, Petoro, TotalEnergies, Vaar Energi and Harbour Energy.
