Norwegian Gas Boost: Faster Resumption through Langeled Pipeline

Norwegian gas exports to Britain via the Langeled pipeline will resume at a faster pace, with available volume increasing to 45 million cubic metres per day. This comes after an outage on Sunday's European gas prices surge. The incident was due to a crack in an offshore pipeline.

The resumption on Friday of Norwegian gas exports to Britain via the Langeled pipeline will progress at a faster pace than initially planned, Norwegian system operator Gassco said on Thursday.

The ramp-up plan will see an available volume of 45 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas per day on Friday from Norway's Nyhamna processing plant, up from 35 mcm projected on Wednesday, according to a message on Gassco's transparency page. Nyhamna, which processes gas for the Langeled pipeline, has a capacity of 79.8 mcm per day when fully operational.

Sunday's outage drove European gas prices on Monday to 38.56 euros per megawatt hour (MWh), their highest since December. Gassco attributed the incident to a crack in a two-inch pipeline onboard Equinor's offshore Sleipner Riser platform. Europe's benchmark gas price traded at 33.5 euros per MWh at 1202 GMT, up 0.4% from the previous day.

Norway in 2022 overtook Russia as Europe's biggest gas supplier after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, meeting roughly a quarter of the continent's demand and making any outages at Norwegian fields a possible trigger for higher prices. The outage earlier this week drove up prices in the

United States and Asia too, on concerns it could tighten supply at a time of worries over remaining Russian volumes and an Asian heatwave increasing competition for liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The United States is a main exporter of LNG and supply outages elsewhere increases demand for U.S. exports and in turn lifts domestic gas prices.

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