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A fire broke out in a large compressor building at the Tjeldbergodden industrial plant on Wednesday afternoon. At 3:45 p.m. the fire department reports that the fire has been extinguished.
Published:,
The case is being updated …
On Wednesday afternoon, the Møre og Romsdal fire brigade announced that there was a fire at Equinor’s industrial plant at Tjeldbergodden in Nordmøre. Just over an hour later, firefighters confirmed on Twitter that the fire was out.
– We have been notified that a fire alarm has been triggered at the Tjeldbergodden methanol factory. In accordance with the procedure, we shut down production at the plant and evacuated personnel. We have mobilized the emergency response organization, Equinor spokesman Morten Eek told E24 at 3.15pm.
The Tjeldbergodden industrial plant consists of a methanol plant, an air gas plant and a gas receiving plant that receives gas from the Heidrun field through the Haltenpipe pipeline.
– The first fire truck has arrived. Four or five ambulances on the way, there are also police cars and helicopters. The fire is in a larger compressor building. “We are a bit unsure of what happened and we have no control,” says operator Paul Ola Vestre at the 110 exchange at NTB at 15:15.
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– Strait somewhat violent
No injuries have been reported, and everyone at the site has been accounted for, operations manager Tove Anita Asp in the Møre og Romsdal police district tells NTB.
A witness at the scene told NRK about the drama that took place in the area.
– I heard a loud bang. Then we said that it started to burn from a gas pipe. Now there is black smoke 150 meters towards the sea. It also sounds full of alarms, said Geir Hermansstad, who fishes just outside the facility.
According to Equinor, the plant that burned is the largest methanol plant in Europe with 25 percent of the total methanol production in Europe. Equinor owns 82 percent, while ConocoPhillips owns the rest.
Subject to major accident regulations.
The Tjeldbergodden factory produces around 900,000 tonnes of methanol per year. The facility is subject to major accident regulations.
“Each shift is trained to deal with accident situations. If an adverse event occurs, Equinor’s emergency preparedness organization will go into effect shortly. The effort will be led by an operations manager on the shift who is on the job.” Equinor writes in a brochure on the danger of installation accidents.
Furthermore, it is stated that no matter what help is requested externally, it will take about 40 minutes from the scene of the emergency to the scene of the accident.
“Emergency preparedness in Tjeldbergodden is built to deal with the accident for the first time only, fighting or limiting it and providing medical first aid to those in need,” writes Equinor.
There are people in the operational organization who are on standby 24 hours a day at the facility. These form an emergency group when incidents occur that make it necessary. This group is related to a contingency plan in which guidelines have been developed for notification tasks and routines that are implemented and led by the contingency group.
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The Melkøya fire
The fire at the industrial plant comes just over two months after a fire broke out at the Equinor gas plant in Melkøya, outside Hammerfest.
This fire was limited to a production room in part of the building.
The Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority previously described the fire at the plant as “one of the most serious incidents in the history of Norwegian oil.”
Equnior has decided that the plant will be closed for up to one year and does not believe that they will be able to start production again until October 1 next year. This means, among other things, that Snøhvit’s new Askeladden satellite field will be postponed for a year.
Both the police and the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority have launched an investigation into the incident.
