OSLO (Reuters) - Energy group StatoilHydro said its Kollsnes gas-processing plant on Norway’s North Sea coast remained shut on Wednesday after a production halt due to a condensate leak on Tuesday.

Kollsnes, with daily processing capacity of up to 143 million standard cubic metres of gas and 69,000 barrels of natural gas liquids (NGL), is one of Norway’s two big gas export plants supplying the European market. The outage sent UK gas prices up as much as 10 percent on Tuesday.
“We are focused on bringing it back up but that has not happened yet,” StatoilHydro spokeswoman Rannveig Stangeland said. StatoilHydro would not give any time frame for the restart, after the stoppage pushed up British gas prices.
A spokesman for North Sea gas pipeline operator Gassco, which also runs the Kollsnes plant, confirmed that it remains shut and said it was hard to predict when it would restart.
“We want to undertake a very controlled start-up,” Gassco spokesman Kjell Varlo Larsen said.
“We need all the information before we start repairing things -- We don’t know how long that will take,” he said.
The Kollsnes plant north of Bergen processes gas from the Troll, Kvitebjoern and Visund fields in the North Sea and exports it through four pipelines to continental Europe.
UK day-ahead gas prices opened on Wednesday at 28.75 pence and eased to 28.50 in morning trade after Tuesday’s jump.
StatoilHydro said on Tuesday that it was working to ensure deliveries to customers by supplying gas from other sources while Kollsnes is shut.