Oslo — Equinor on Thursday said power supply to Norway’s Kollsnes gas processing plant and the offshore Troll A platform had been restored following an outage earlier in the day that reduced natural gas exports to Europe.
The Kollsnes plant is one of Norway’s biggest energy export facilities with a daily capacity to process 158 million cubic metres of natural gas, according to the plant’s owner Gassco.
Operators are now preparing for a safe restart of gas exports, a Gassco spokesperson said.
The incident at Kollsnes is expected to curb Thursday’s gas processing capacity by 39 million cubic metres, Gassco’s transparency website showed, although volume estimates may change.
The unexpected power outage happened during work on a substation transformer, a spokesperson for Norway’s electricity transmission system operator Statnett told Reuters.
Equinor in a statement said the power cut triggered a brief evacuation at Kollsnes, in line with procedure.
“We are in a normalisation phase and planning for a safe restart of the facility,” the Gassco spokesperson said.
Norway became Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, providing about 30% of all gas imports to the European Union.
There was no immediate impact on European gas prices, which fell on Thursday on warmer weather and the impact from U.S. trade tariffs, which traders said could ultimately weaken energy demand.
Reporting by Nora Buli. Editing by Terje Solsvik, Mark Potter and Bernadette Baum – Reuters
