Yahoo! News: Shell Shuts Down Production in Oil Field: “Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. said Friday that it shut down its 140,000-barrel per day Draugen offshore oil field because of damage to its oil-loading equipment.” (ShellNews.net) Posted 8 Jan 05

Business - AP

OSLO, Norway - Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. said Friday that it shut down its 140,000-barrel per day Draugen offshore oil field because of damage to its oil-loading equipment.

The damage had forced Shell to cut production to 75,000 barrels per day in the field in the Norwegian Sea on Tuesday, but had shut down completely because bad weather prevented repairs, company spokeswoman Kitty Eide said.

The shutdown means that Norway has lost nearly 11 percent of its normal capacity of roughly 3.2 million barrels per day.

Norway is the world's third largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Bad weather was in part blamed for Statoil ASA being unable to restart 205,000 barrels per day of production from two other fields, Snorre and Vigdis, which were shut down after a Nov. 28 natural gas leak.  

The Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority, a government agency, has said it needs calmer weather to complete inspections of the Snorre field before it can allow production to resume. It has also said damage to wells may be greater than first believed, and could not give an estimated start date.

At the Draugen field, damage to loading equipment slowed transfers of oil to tankers to the point that the platform's storage tanks were full, and production had to be shut down.

Eide told Dow Jones Newswires that there was a small chance of completing repairs on Friday "but the weather window isn't looking good."

She also said the chances of repairs on Saturday also looked "very hit-and-run."

Once repairs are made, Eide said production could be back to normal within a day.

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