Equinor began a three-day planned maintenance window at Hammerfest LNG (4.3 mtpa), rescheduled from 8-11 to 13-16 June1. Hammerfest is Norway's only seaborne LNG export terminal, on Melkoya island; Equinor is the state-majority operator and Europe's dominant gas supplier.
Norwegian seaborne send-out into north-west Europe is therefore suppressed for three days of the pre-ban window.
Equinor's offline export terminal removes Norwegian volume outright for three days, 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 planned maintenance, 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.
