Outage at Hydro Norwegian aluminium plant: Update

Adds new information on outage, including spokesperson comments, and update on cyber attack

A power failure disrupted operations today at Norsk Hydro's aluminium plant in Karmoy, Norway and the facility could take 2-3 months to return to normal operations.

The primary aluminium plant suffered a power failure at 03:50 local time. Power supply has been re-established, but at a lower amperage, the company said. The cause of the failure remains unclear.

It will take around 2-3 months to return to normal operations after this scale of outage, the company said, although the firm noted that it is still too early to give a definitive timeframe.

At the plant, 45 production cells were taken out of production to enable stable operations. These cells represent approximately 10pc of total production capacity. The Karmoy plant has 288 cells in total.

Hydro expects no real impact on customers as it says it will replace material from the affected production line with supply from other operations.

A spokesperson said if the outage is limited to today, there will be only a "very limited" impact on 2019 production.

The Karmoy plant produces 270,000 t/yr of primary aluminium, of which the Karmoy technology pilot unit — unaffected by the outage — produces 75,000 t/yr. The plant casts extrusion ingots and wire rod.

Norsk Hydro was targeted by a cyber-attack on 19 March, causing some units to halt production.

The firm's extruded solutions unit is close to returning to normal operations but is still employing a lot of workarounds and local variations from plant to plant, it said in an update today.

Norsk Hydro's extrusion business in Europe and North America and its precision tubing segment are currently running at an average output of 85pc. The building systems operations are now operating at around 60pc, up from 40-50pc on [28 March(https://metals.argusmedia.com/newsandanalysis/article/1874793).

Hydro produced 1.1mn t of primary aluminium in 2017, making it Europe's second-largest producer.