North Sea Buzzard oil field experiences outage

10 May 2012

Posted by Neil Brunskill

There were more problems at the Buzzard oil field in the North Sea yesterday (May 9th) when it experienced a temporary outage.

Operator Nexen said there was a fault with a gas-processing unit that required production to be shut down, Reuters reports.

The unscheduled outage went on for several hours, with the slowdown in output created as a result potentially set to affect heating oil prices in the short term.

It comes after Buzzard was temporarily closed at the end of last month due to a fire, with operations halted for almost two days.

Buzzard typically pumps out 200,000 barrels each day, so it is now known how much the reduction created by the two events will cut this down to on average.

It is not thought that any oil was leaked into the North Sea and the oil field is now operational once more.

Nexen's Kevin Reinhart recently said it is vital to improve Buzzard's reliability if it is to boost its relationship with investors.

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