London — The unplanned outage at the Total-operated Culzean gas field in the UK North Sea has been extended by at least another day, grid operator National Grid said in a REMIT note Wednesday.

The Total-operated gas field tripped late Monday, with the field's production capacity reduced to zero during Tuesday's gas day.

According to an updated REMIT note published at 8:06 am local time Wednesday, Culzean's production capacity has been cut to just 8 GWh from its current technical daily capacity of 130 GWh (12 million cu m).

The note added that "issues starting Culzean compressor were preventing gas export" after a restart attempt Tuesday evening.

Earlier, the operator said the capacity had been cut to 34 GWh with gas delivered to Teeside coming from stock.

Culzean -- which only started production on June 11 -- has been hit by a number of technical problems since it began operations in June.

There was no explanation for the latest outage, which began at 10:30 pm Monday. It follows an issue on August 1 that was only resolved on August 8 after several restart attempts.

Culzean is one of the UK's biggest producing fields and is expected to ramp up to plateau production of 14 million cu m/d.

At those rates, Culzean is capable of meeting between 5% and 10% of UK gas demand.

-- Andreas Franke, andreas.franke@spglobal.com

-- Edited by Alisdair Bowles, newsdesk@spglobal.com