Shell key gas plant in Norway suffers outage

OSLO: The Nyhamna natural gas plant on Norway's western coast, which processes gas from Royal Dutch Shell's giant Ormen Lange field, suffered an unexpected outage early on Saturday, gas system operator Gassco said.

Output at the plant, which produces primarily for export to Britain, is expected to be down by 32 million cubic metres on Saturday, Gassco said in a market message.

The Nyhamna issue comes on top of an outage at Statoil's Kvitebjørn gas field, which already reduced output by 22 million cubic metres on Saturday.

Norway is Europe's second biggest piped gas exporter and the two outages equal around a sixth of its daily production.