Equinor
Norwegian state-majority oil and gas company; dominant supplier of gas to Europe.
Equinor's Hammerfest LNG terminal, shut for planned maintenance from 22 April 2026, was still running two simultaneous outages by 13 June, an unresolved compressor fault stacked on top of scheduled repair work.
Last refreshed: 3 August 2026 · Appears in 3 active topics
TWIN is funded and Hammerfest is still disrupted, when does Norway's gas output recover to full capacity?
Timeline for Equinor
Named higher transportation costs in group opex
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European Energy MarketsTook FID on TWIN project committing NOK 4bn for 11 bcm first gas in 2028
European Energy Markets: Equinor takes FID on Troll TWINBackground
Equinor is Norway's state-majority oil and gas company, 67% owned by the Norwegian government, founded in Stavanger in 1972 as Statoil and rebranded Equinor in 2018. It is the largest pipeline gas supplier to Continental Europe, a position built on production from the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
Its flagship assets anchor that role: the Troll field underpins Norway's long-term gas supply commitment, the Johan Sverdrup field accounts for roughly a third of Norway's crude output, and Hammerfest LNG is Norway's only LNG export terminal, with roughly 4.3 million tonnes a year of capacity. That concentration of critical infrastructure in a small number of named assets means an outage at any one of them, as 2026 demonstrated repeatedly, has an outsized effect on European gas prices.
Hammerfest's silence outlasts the outage
Equinor's Q1 2026 earnings call on 6 May, the most natural disclosure window before markets' own 15 May Deadline for a restart update, passed without any guidance on when Hammerfest LNG, Norway's only LNG export terminal, would return from its 22 April maintenance outage. The 2025 cycle had entered on the same calendar date and slipped twice into August, a pattern that made Equinor's continued silence itself a market signal.
By 13 June the plant was running two outages at once: the unresolved compressor fault sat alongside planned maintenance Equinor layered on top of it from 13-16 June, removing Norway's seaborne LNG supply option at the point in the injection season Europe most needed it.
Equinor answers outages with new gas
Equinor approved a $370m final investment decision on the Troll TWIN project on 19 June, aiming to extract 11bcm of additional gas from the Troll field with first production in 2028, a volume that will help replace lost Russian supply but arrives too late to help the 2026 injection season it was announced during.
More immediately, Equinor's ASGARD field returned from maintenance by 11 July, helping lift Norway's Gassco exit nominations back to 319.8 million cubic metres a day and giving the European system enough gas to absorb that week's price swings without drawing down existing storage.