OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Gas production capacity at BP's Skarv field offshore Norway is likely to remain reducedby 40 percent until mid-February due to an ongoing outage, aspokesman said on Tuesday.
The floating production, storage and offloading vessel(FPSO) has a capacity to produce 19 million cubic metres (mcm)of gas and 85,000 barrels of oil per day at the field.
Gas production from Skarv in the Norwegian Sea has beenrestricted since November last year due to a short-circuit in ahigh-voltage transformer shutting one of the two gas exporttrains.
A new transformer has been delivered to Norway, but it wasunclear when the installation can take place as this wasdependent on weather, BP's spokesman in Norway Jan Erik Geirmosaid.
"The weather in the winter period has proven very unstableand we need very calm sea for safe operations. The earliestpossibility (to install the new transformer) will be close tomid-February provided the weather is fine," he told Reuters inan email.
"Oil production is running close to maximum," he added.
BP has previously said that oil production would beprioritised while gas output remains restricted.
BP has a 23.84 per cent interest in the production license,while Norway's Statoil holds 36.17 per cent, Germany'sE.ON 28.08 per cent and Poland's PGNiG 11.92 percent. (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Terje Solsvik)