Total Restarts Production at St Fergus Terminal
Production at the St Fergus natural gas terminal in Britain restarted on Monday afternoon following an unplanned offshore outage which resulted in reduced production, Total Exploration and Production UK said. The outage at the terminal on the northeast coast of Scotland caused UK spot natural gas prices to climb by as much as 6 percent on Monday morning. The St Fergus terminal receives and processes gas from over 20 North Sea gas fields. (Reporting by Henning Gloystein; Editing by Pravin Char)
Statoil Criticizes British Gas Plan
Statoil said Britain risks losing out on gas imports if it does not change its pricing system for bringing natural gas onto the mainland from offshore fields. Rune Bjornson, managing director of Statoil (UK) Limited, said the recently introduced system of auctioning entry capacity, or access rights to the national pipeline system, produced very high, volatile prices. "We are not happy with the regime. We would like to have a predictable, stable regime which is more reflective of actual costs," Bjornson told Reuters in an interview. The erratic prices produced by the auction system will discourage producers like Statoil, one of Europe's main gas suppliers, from supplying gas into Britain where demand for natural gas is booming, he said.
