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Oslo - Norwegian gas flow to the United Kingdom remained choppy on Tuesday as power began returning to Royal Dutch Shell's Ormen Lange gas processing plant after holiday storms cut off its electricity.
Shell's plant on the Norwegian coast, which gets power from Norway's public grid, can provide some 20% of Britain's gas demand through the Langeled pipeline.
Power failed at key spots on Sunday and Monday as Atlantic storm "Dagmar" harried Norway's coast. On Tuesday officials warned of potential new trouble for power distribution and road and train traffic as a second storm hit.
British gas imports through Langeled fell to about 24 million cubic metres/day on Tuesday at 06:00 GMT and held there for two hours after peaking overnight at 33 mcm/d.
Earlier they had stepped up from a post-Dagmar low of 7 mcm/d, according to data from the UK National Grid. Before Sunday's outages the flow had been about 60 million mcm/d.
By Monday at 19:48 GMT, the Shell plant's power consumption from the grid had returned to 25% of capacity, Shell told the Nordic power bourse.
"Due to grid problems the power consumption is low," Shell said.
The shutdown of the plant at Nyhamna, between Bergen and Trondheim, occurred on Sunday. No one at Shell could be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Oil and gas output at Statoil's offshore installations was not affected by Dagmar at its peak, the Norwegian company said on Monday, though power to its Kollsnes power plant cut out intermittently.
The Nordic country is the world's eighth-largest oil exporter and the second-largest for gas.
