Troll gas field extends partial outage until May 31

Equinor has extended a partial outage at Norway's Troll natural gas field until May 31 due to a compressor failure, the company said in a regulatory filing on Monday, pushing European gas prices higher.

Norway in 2022 overtook Russia as Europe's biggest supplier of natural gas when Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine upended decades-long energy ties.

Troll, Europe's biggest natural gas field, has seen outages of various scope since May 21 when an annual one-day stop-start test was performed.

"Following a test, we identified a need for corrective maintenance on Troll A on Friday," a spokesperson for field operator Equinor said in a statement, referring to the name of one of the field's offshore platforms.

Gas production will be reduced by 34.6 million cubic metres per day (mcm/d) from Monday, May 26 to Friday, May 30 at 04:00 GMT, leaving in place a remaining output capacity of 90 mcm/d, the regulatory filing posted on the Gassco website showed.

A separate filing showed that an outage of 16.2 mcm/d was planned from May 30 to May 31, ending at 04:00 GMT on Saturday.

(Reporting by Nora Buli, editing by Terje Solsvik, Kirsten Donovan)