An unplanned outage at Norway's largest gas field, Troll, has reduced natural gas exports by 34.6 million cubic metres (mcm) per day, significantly impacting Europe's supply. The disruption was caused by a failure of external power supplies at the end of last week and is expected to last at least until Tuesday, according to Norwegian grid operator Gassco.

The impact on gas supplies is already clearly noticeable: on Monday morning, Norwegian exports to continental Europe were only 250 mcm/day - a significant drop compared to the 274.5 mcm/day on Friday afternoon.

The situation is exacerbated by planned maintenance work on several Norwegian gas plants. The annual maintenance of the Nyhamna gas processing plant is particularly significant, reducing capacity by a further 68.8 mcm/day. Taken together, these outages are putting a strain on Europe's gas supply in an already tight market situation.

The Troll field in the North Sea is Norway's most productive gas field and a key supplier to the EU. Whilst maintenance and temporary production interruptions are common during the summer, the unplanned nature of this disruption - in addition to the scheduled work - brings unforeseen uncertainty to the European energy market.

The incident emphasises how fragile European gas supplies remain, with limited storage capacity and ongoing geopolitical tensions putting additional pressure on supply chains.

UPDATE 10:15 am: QUANTITIES AND MARKET REACTION

Equinor, the operator of the Troll natural gas field, is forced to reduce production first by almost 24 million Nm3/day and then by 87 million Nm3/day - this after the Troll field was already struggling with power supply problems last week.

This means that only 37 million Nm3/day of the technically available capacity of the largest operating natural gas production field in Europe of max. 124 million Nm3/day is available - with the consequence that Norway's total deliveries to the EU and the UK will have to be temporarily reduced by around 1/3. This is against the background of the planned and currently ongoing maintenance work at the Norwegian processing plants Nyhamna and Aasta-Hansteen.

This cut comes at an unfavourable time for the EU, which is now replenishing its gas storage facilities ahead of next winter. Dutch front-month futures currently rose by around 1.7% to €37.185/MWh on the TTF . Electricity contracts also rose as a result.