Equinor restarts output at Hammerfest LNG plant after gas leak

Production at Equinor's EQNR Hammerfest LNG plant in Arctic northern Norway has restarted after a four-day outage that followed the discovery of a gas leak, the company said on Saturday.

"Production has started," a spokesperson for Equinor said.

The facility, which has a capacity to deliver 18.4 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas per day, was briefly evacuated on Tuesday while already offline for a maintenance outage initially scheduled to last just one day.

Repairs of the leak were completed on Wednesday, and a restart had been scheduled for 1000 GMT on Saturday.

LSEG ship-tracking data showed LNG tanker Arctic Voyager departed Melkoeya fully loaded for Finland's Inkoo terminal on Friday afternoon, having been moored since Thursday.

Tankers can load at Melkoeya as long as there is LNG in the onsite tank, Equinor said.

Two more tankers, the Cool Runner and Seapeak Arwa are anchored in the vicinity, likely waiting to load in the coming days, according to the LSEG data.