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Restart of Europe’s only large-scale LNG plant delayed after gas leak

14 September 2020

Equinor has delayed the restart of it’s Melkøya LNG plant near the town of Hammerfest on Norway’s northern coast until September 23 due to a gas leak. The plant had been shut down for a short time due to an outage and was scheduled to restart at 11:00 on September 13.

Melkøya LNG plant - Image: Flickr/Joakim Aleksander Mathisen

According to Reuters news agency, local emergency services were sent to the Melkøya LNG plant at 04:52 on September 13 after an alarm was raised during preparations to restart the plant. Reuters quotes an Equinor spokesperson as saying that emergency services attended the scene but that the situation was under control.

Equinor’s Melkøya LNG plant liquefies natural gas from Norway’s Arctic Snoehvit gas field and is Europe’s only large-scale LNG plant with a capacity to process 18 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas per day.

Equinor has not given further details on the reason for the shut down or how the gas leak occurred.