Norway's gas network operator said Tuesday the country's biggest gas processing plant, Kollsnes, has been completely shut due to a condensate leak which caused the entire site to be evacuated.

"I can confirm that it has been shut for the past one and half hours. There's an emergency situation based on a leak in part of the processing plant," Gassco spokesman Kjell Varlo Larsen told Dow Jones Newswires.

"We haven't worked out the problem because the site has had to be evacuated, so we're not yet able to get into the part where the leak is," he said. "It is hard to say how long the problem might last...but it will obviously have a consequence for Norwegian gas deliveries for the next 24 hours.

"We don't know yet what that reduction will be. It depends when the situation at Kollsnes can be normalized," Larsen said.

He said the system operator will "seek to increase deliveries from other fields" to compensate for the volume shortfall.

It is unlikely Kollsnes was processing at its maximum capacity of 143 million cubic meters a day because demand for gas from the U.K. and the continent in May wouldn't usually be at a peak.

Kollsnes is located on Norway's west coast and processes gas from some of the country's biggest fields, including Troll and Kvitebjoern. It is then piped to markets in Europe.

A consortium of gas shippers called Gassled, including ConocoPhillips (COP), Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) and Total SA (TOT), owns the vast majority of Norway's gas infrastructure.

Company Web site: www.gassco.no

-By Elizabeth Adams, Dow Jones Newswires; +44 (0) 20 7842 9386; elizabeth.adams@dowjones.com