Gassco data showed on Thursday that Hammerfest LNG will be offline until January 9, 2025.
LNG Prime invited Equinor to comment on the matter.
“After a safe Christmas with stable production, we had an issue yestreday on a compressor which re-injects CO2 to the field and it is therefore out of service,” a spokeswoman for Equinor said.
“We have decided to stop production today, January 2, at 16:00 for repair. The repair is expected to take a week, with a planned startup on January 9,” the spokeswoman said.
In April 2024, Equinor also closed the facility due to a gas leak.
The news comes just a day after Russia’s Gazprom halted pipeline gas supplies to Europe via Ukraine.
The Hammerfest LNG plant mainly supplies European countries with LNG. It liquefies natural gas coming from the Snohvit field in the Barents Sea.
Gas reaches Hammerfest LNG via a 160-kilometer gas pipeline which became operational in the autumn of 2007.
Equinor is the operator of both the Snohvit field and Hammerfest LNG with a 36.8 percent stake.
Other license owners of Snohvit are Petoro (30 percent), TotalEnergies EP Norge (18.4 percent), Neptune Energy Norge (12 percent), and Wintershall Dea Norge (2.81 percent).
The partners are currently working on upgrading the facility.
The Snohvit Future project will extend the productive life of Hammerfest LNG past 2030, and includes onshore compression and electrification of Hammerfest LNG.
Equinor and its partners said in December 2022 they would invest 13.2 billion Norwegian krone ($1.16 billion) to upgrade the facility.
In October 2024, Equinor reported an increase in costs for the Snohvit Future project.
Since the PDO (plan for development and operation) the cost increase is 1.9 billion 2024-NOK, Equinor said.
(Updated with a statement by Equinor.)
