Equinor's Hammerfest LNG plant restarts after a brief outage

Norway's Equinor is restarting its Hammerfest LNG plant following an unscheduled production outage and expects to begin filling its tanks with liquefied natural gas (LNG) on Tuesday afternoon local time, a spokesperson told Reuters.

Europe's largest export terminal for LNG shut down on Saturday due an overheating electrical transformer, the company has said.

The facility, also known as Melkoeya LNG, accounts for roughly five per cent of all Norwegian gas exports.

The plant, which on August 4 ended a 15-week maintenance outage, has the capacity to deliver around 6.5 billion cubic metres of gas per year, enough to supply around 6.5 million European homes per day.

The plant at Melkoeya island receives gas from the Snoehvit field in the Barents Sea, some 143 kilometres offshore. Its owners are Equinor, Petoro, TotalEnergies, Vaar Energi and Harbour Energy.

(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen and Nora Buli, editing by Anna Ringstrom and Terje Solsvik)