The giant gas field that holds around 40 percent of total gas reserves on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) is set to produce a record amount of gas this year, just as gas demand in the UK is on the rise.
Output at Norwegian field Troll—operated by Statoil—is expected to rise to record levels this year after Norway increased its production allowance for the field’s gas output, Bloomberg quoted a senior Statoil manager as saying.
“They are gently and carefully opening the valve for Troll,” Tor Martin Anfinnsen, senior vice president for marketing and trading at Statoil, told Bloomberg in a phone interview last week. “There is higher demand in particular from the U.K. now but that doesn’t affect how much we produce in total, it more affects where we route the gas,” Anfinnsen noted.
The UK—a large consumer of Norwegian gas—has vowed to shut all coal-fired power plants by 2025. In addition, UK energy company Centrica said last month that it “intends to make all relevant applications to permanently end Rough’s status as a storage facility.”
Moreover, UK’s gas production from the North Sea is expected to decline, and dependence on gas imports should rise. According to the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), UK’s gas import dependency would rise to 78 percent in 2035, compared to 48 percent dependency estimated for 2017.