OSLO (Reuters) - Norway’s StatoilHydro restarted production at its Kristin gas and condensate field on Thursday after a two-week shutdown to repair faulty lifeboats on the platform, a company spokesman said.

The company had shut the Norwegian Sea field on Jan. 8. Production had been around 10 million cubic meters of gas and 63,000 barrels of condensate per day before the shutdown.
“We started production on Thursday and expect it to be back at full production later on Friday,” spokesman Geir Gjervan said.
The field, which came on stream in November 2005, has total production capacity of more than 18 million cubic meters of gas and about 126,000 barrels of condensate per day.
The company replaced lifeboat components and carried out extensive testing to ensure that the craft function in all weather and wave conditions, StatoilHydro said.
A fault in the hydraulic mechanism that releases the lifeboats has been corrected, it said.
StatoilHydro has had similar problems with lifeboats on other platforms earlier.
“Our lifeboats are safer now than they were only a short time ago,” Alf Morten Sirevaag, who heads the lifeboat project in StatoilHydro, said in the statement.
“We still expect that production could be interrupted on some installations during the winter, but believe that the impact will be lower this season than in earlier years,” he said.