Equinor, Europe's biggest supplier of natural gas, will use upcoming late-summer maintenance season to ensure that Norway's ageing fields can continue to deliver energy at a reliable pace, the company's CEO told Reuters on Wednesday.
The maintenance and repair of Norwegian gas infrastructure, which includes offshore platforms, subsea pipelines and onshore terminals, is closely watched by the market and unplanned outages can have a particularly strong impact on prices.
"We have aging platforms on the Norwegian continental shelf. That's why it's so important to keep the maintenance schedules," CEO Anders Opedal said in an interview on the sidelines of a company earnings presentation.
Equinor's profit for the April-June period beat expectations with higher gas production offsetting some of the effect of lower prices.
Even when the gas crisis hit in 2022, Equinor made sure to carry out all scheduled oil and gas maintenance both for oil installations and the gas infrastructure, Opedal said.
Equinor, which operates dozens of fields in Norwegian waters, in 2022 overtook Russia's Gazprom as Europe's biggest gas supplier after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine upended decades-long energy ties.
The third quarter will see the heaviest Norwegian infrastructure maintenance this year, cutting supplies by up to 181 mcm/day, about half the maximum capacity of around 360 mcm/day, data from Norwegian pipeline system operator Gassco showed.
This includes a planned outage at Europe's largest gas processing plant, Kaarstoe, which will affect gas production from Norway, Opedal said.
Kaarstoe is a key hub for gas deliveries to continental Europe and Britain, with a daily capacity of 97.6 million cubic metres (mcm), and will be completely offline from Aug. 30 to Sept. 20, Gassco's data showed.
Traditionally, Equinor has had 99% uptime on its gas value chain, although a longer outage at Norway's Nyhamna processing plant in 2023 reduced that figure somewhat, Opedal said.
"So we don't worry, but we have a lot of focus on it," he added.
(Reuters - Reporting by Nora Buli, editing by Terje Solsvik and David Evans)
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