Gassco releases Norwegian field maintenance schedule

Norwegian offshore operator Gassco has released its 2015 schedule for natural gas field production maintenance on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). The update, released on Thursday, outlines periods of downtime for fields, entry terminals and processing plants connecting to the Norwegian grid.

Production impacts as a result of the maintenance peak between late April and the end of August.

The largest cut-back in production starts on 10 April 2015 when yearly maintenance begins at the Kollsnes processing plant and at an unnamed field, impacting capacity by up to 169 million cubic metres (mcm)/day and 120mcm/day respectively.

The timing and size of the cu-back makes it likely that the unnamed field is Troll, as it sends all its exports to Kollsnes and is one of the biggest fields on the NCS.

New compressors are due to come online at Troll in 2015 as field operator Statoil looks to boost recoverable reserves by 80 billion cubic metres (bcm) ( see ESGM 22 October ).

There will be six scheduled events curtailing capacity in 2015 at Kollsnes.

Another period which will see a substantial fall in production will be from 19 May 2015 until early June. At this time both the British Easington and Belgian Zeebrugge entry points will have periods where they will receive no imports as they undergo annual maintenance.

Easington Norwegian imports come entirely through the Langeled pipeline which has a technical capacity of 71.2mcm/day while Zeebrugge is supplied by Zeepipe whose capacity 42.4mcm/day.

Towards the end of August there will be a number of planned maintenance events at a number of entry points and fields. From 17 August and into September, the Dutch/German entry point Emden and the pipelines which carry gas into the British St. Fergus terminal will have volumes curtailed.

In early October, Gassco made a number of changes to the data it provided on its website, including a lowering of the volume impact threshold for outage reports and the naming of fields affected by unplanned trips in supply ( see ESGM 1 October 2014 ). Thomas Rodgers