Statoil ASA (STO) Wednesday said it will soon export a cargo of liquefied natural gas from its Snoehvit field in north Norway after the onshore processing plant at Melkoeya restarted last week.
"Operations are proceeding as planned, and we are starting shipment of [the] first cargo soon," a Statoil spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires. He couldn't give further details but said a new release will follow.
Statoil carried out three months of repairs at Melkoeya earlier this year, but the restart in early November stalled and it has remained offline since.
The plant, which processes natural gas into liquefied natural gas ready for export by ship, has been plagued with outages and technology glitches since it started up in August 2007. It is Europe's first production facility for LNG in Europe, and has a planned production capacity of around 5.75 billion cubic meters a year of which 1.6 billion cubic meters is contracted to Spain and 2.4 billion cubic meters to the U.S. with options to reroute. It has never reached capacity.
Statoil owns 33.53% of Snoehvit, Petoro owns 30%, GdF Suez SA (GSZ.FR) 12%, Total SA (TOT) 18.40%, Hess Norge 3.26% and RWE Dea 2.81%.