Equinor’s Hammerfest LNG facility in Arctic Norway has experienced another setback, this time caused by a compressor failure, according to a regulatory statement from Gassco. Operations at Europe’s largest LNG export plant have been completely halted and are not expected to resume until January 9, leaving the facility offline for a week.
Hammerfest LNG, also known as Melkoeya, plays a critical role in Europe’s energy supply, providing enough natural gas to heat 6.5 million homes. This represents 5% of Norway’s gas exports, a significant share, especially given the country’s increased importance in Europe’s energy landscape following the disruption of Russian gas supplies since 2022.
This latest outage adds to a series of operational issues for the plant. Past incidents have included a gas leak in April 2024 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in an 18-month shutdown, further tarnishing the plant’s reliability. Despite these challenges, Equinor, alongside co-owners TotalEnergies, Vaar Energi, Petoro, and Harbour Energy, continues operations at the Snoehvit field, which feeds the plant with natural gas from the Barents Sea.
The Hammerfest LNG facility has an annual gas export capacity of approximately 6.5 billion cubic meters, enough to supply a substantial portion of Europe’s heating needs. However, this latest disruption comes at a critical time, with the winter heating season already in full swing.
As Europe grapples with the energy impacts of the ongoing winter, the shutdown of Hammerfest LNG compounds the region’s reliance on Norwegian gas exports, especially in light of recent outages at other facilities like the Kaarstoe processing plant, which was down for three weeks in late September due to “complex and extensive maintenance.”
With Russia’s Gazprom largely cutting off its gas supply to the European Union following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Norway has become the EU’s primary natural gas provider, making the reliability of plants like Hammerfest even more crucial in maintaining energy security across the continent.