Equinor began a fresh planned maintenance window at Hammerfest LNG (4.3 mtpa), rescheduled from 8-11 to 13-16 June, layered on top of the unresolved compressor fault that has kept the Arctic plant dark since 22 April 1. Hammerfest is Norway's only seaborne LNG export terminal, on Melkoya island; Equinor is the state-majority operator and Europe's dominant gas supplier. For the first time the plant carries two distinct, simultaneously active stoppages rather than one prolonged outage.
Norwegian seaborne send-out into north-west Europe is therefore suppressed across the entire pre-ban window. Equinor's Troll A compressor fault of the same class ran 24 days past its first restart date , and a parallel Troll outage layered cuts the same way in late May , so a fault stacked under planned maintenance carries a real overrun risk rather than a clean 16 June return.
Equinor's doubly offline export terminal removes Norwegian volume outright, the kind of supply loss that would normally bid the front, yet the benchmark fell anyway through the same window. Where the LNG arb diverts flexible cargoes by spread, Hammerfest subtracts firm Norwegian molecules by fault, and neither lifted the price. That is the clearest evidence in the briefing that demand destruction, not supply, is setting the prompt into the binding date.
