Prices rebound after Norwegian outage extended

LONDON, June 13 (Reuters) - Wholesale British and Dutch gas prices rebounded on Tuesday afternoon, after earlier losses, after an outage at Norway's Nyhamna gas processing plant was extended.

The Dutch benchmark front-month contract was 3.88 euros higher at 34.10 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) by 1338 GMT, while the day-ahead price rose by 4.20 euros to 33.50 euros/MWh.

The British July price rose by 9.30 euros to 85.80 euros/MWh.

A maintenance outage at Norway's Nyhamna gas processing plant has been extended by almost a month to mid-July due to problems with the plant's cooling system, operator Shell said.

Shell extended the outage to July 15 from 21 June, according to an update via the transparency pages of Norwegian gas infrastructure operator Gassco.

Nyhamna processes gas from the Ormen Lange and Aasta Hansteen fields, with the outage cutting 79.8 million cubic metres (mcm) of export capacity per day.

"This has upturned the market as prices were lower this morning," a gas trader said.

Norway is carrying out several maintenance outages at gas infrastructure assets, which does carry the risk of extensions, the trader added.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney)