Shell extends Norway Nyhamna gas plant maintenance on cooling system issues

Shell extends Norway Nyhamna gas plant maintenance on cooling system issues

A maintenance outage at Norway's Nyhamna gas processing plant has been extended by almost a month to mid-July due to problems with the plant's cooling system, operator Shell said.

Shell extended the outage to July 15 from 21 June, according to an update via the transparency pages of Norwegian gas infrastructure operator Gassco.

Shell said it had stopped all non-essential work at Nyhamna after discovering a gas formation with hydrogen when cleaning a water-based cooling system.

"We are working to resolve the technical issues," a company spokesperson said.

The gas formed in the cooling system is not related to the natural gas that is usually processed and exported from Nyhamna, Shell said.

Nyhamna processes gas from the Ormen Lange and Aasta Hansteen fields, with the outage cutting 79.8 million cubic metres (mcm) of export capacity per day.