The duration of unplanned maintenance being carried out on two Norwegian gas fields has been extended, according to network operator Gassco on Wednesday.
Compressor failure affecting the Asgard asset was extended to an expected duration of between 3 and 4 weeks, the event having started at 1308 GMT on August 24, resulting in a 9.9 million cu m/d loss of production until corrective works are completed.
The Gullfaks field, which also suffered a compressor failure at 2053 GMT on August 27, had its own unplanned maintenance period extended, with Gassco estimating the duration at three to five days in total.
This outage was declared with a volume impact of 6.6 million cu m/d.
The estimates of duration for both events have been altered since they were firstly announced, with Gullfaks initially thought to last for 24 hours, whereas the Asgard problem was originally expected to impact two weeks? worth of production.
Both production assets can potentially feed into the Karsto processing plant for delivery into the dry gas network for mainland UK and EU supply, with Gullfaks having the additional option of flowing via the Tampen Link to the UK St Fergus terminal. No maintenance events were declared for the Asgard transport system into Karsto.
The field outages coincide with planned maintenance at the St Fergus exit terminal, scheduled to reduce throughput by 10.3 million cu m/d between 0500 GMT on August 29 and 0500 GMT on August 31, and the ongoing works at Kollsnes processing plant and supplying fields currently reducing availability by 36 million cu m/d.
Aggregated exit flows from the dry gas network totaled 274.6 million cu m/d at 1030 GMT on Wednesday, a marginal increase from 24 hours earlier, and were supplied fully in a balanced Norwegian system.
