One of Europe’s largest suppliers of gas — Norway’s energy champion StatoilHydro — said it was already producing all the gas it could, and any extra sold was bound for the Continent's trading clearance hubs and not gas-starved Central Europe.

“We are already producing at full capacity, and most of the volumes produced on the Norwegian continental shelf are sold on long-term contracts to customers in Europe,” company spokesperson for gas matters, Rannveig Stangeland, told Scandoil.com Thursday.

All extra volumes from Norway are transported to gas trading and clearance hubs, mostly in the United Kingdom, which gets about 20 percent of its gas from Norway. Norwegian gas producers send Europe 16 percent of its gas supplies, mostly to France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

German and Polish gas suppliers have recently made gains in their direct ownership of Norwegian gas by taking up larger exploration and production stakes in the Nordic country. And yet each year, Gazprom and StatoilHydro are the No. 1 or No. 2 suppliers to the large German gas companies.

German-owned gas pipelines carrying Norwegian gas into the heart of Europe haven’t prevented customers queuing up with small natural gas tanks in Central Europe. Norwegian radio NRK reported 70,000 homes in Sarajevo were without supplies, although on Thursday, StatoilHydro itself elected to shut down a gas-producing platform in the North Sea over lifeboat worries.

For Europe, It’s the seventh day of supply disruption from Russia, after Gazprom announced it had shut off supplies to Ukraine over a large unpaid bill. In the row, Naftogaz of the Ukraine is understood to have shut off all pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe.

Ukraine has traditionally paid a fraction of European gas prices for gas coming from Russia, but the arrangement is understood to be part of the gas transit deal with Russia.

Meanwhile, negotiations in Brussels, Berlin and Moscow over ending the gas shortage in Central Europe have intensified without signs of breakthrough.

Tags: StatoilHydro