Norway's Statoil said Friday it will shut output at some of its North Sea oil and gas fields over the weekend as a major storm heads to the region.
It declined to say which fields would be concerned, but said they were situated in the Norwegian sea.
"We will reduce production on a few installations as a precautionary measure," Ola Anders Skauby, a spokesman for Statoil, told Platts.
"We do not expect it to have a significant impact on production overall."
Statoil said some fields would stop output as soon as Friday, but declined to say how long the shut-in would last.
An official with a Norwegian producer, who did not want to be named, said that Statoil's facilities in the Haltenbanken area were likely to be affected and these included the Heidrun and Kristen oil and gas fields.
Meanwhile, Shell and ConocoPhillips, which also operate oil and gas fields in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, said their operations were unlikely to be affected.
"The storm...is coming in further north from our facilities. The forecast is for the storm to hit in Stad which is in the middle of the south part of Norway, between Trondheim and Bergen," said ConocoPhillips spokesman Stig Kvendseth.
Shell spokesman Kim Byebruun said that his company's Ormen Lange gas field and the Draugen oil field lay in the region that would be affected by the storm, but that production would likely be unaffected.
"Bad weather is is not unusual this time of the year and we are quite used to it," he said. "There will also be restrictions on outside work on the platform at Draugen. But [the storm] will not affect Draugen's production."
The UK's BBC weather service described the storm Friday as an "explosively deepening area of low pressure" that occurs only once in a few years.
"The pressure is falling so quickly, meteorologists refer to it as bomb," it said.
The storm was created by the contrast between a cold air mass situated over the Atlantic ocean and hot air from southern Europe.
The UK's Met Office issued Thursday and Friday gale warnings for the majority of its shipping forecast areas. It said winds could peak at 100 mph at sea with wave heights of up to 20 meters (60 ft).
