March 17 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it will raise production at Norway’s Ormen Lange natural-gas field to 420,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day by the end of the year.

Europe’s third-largest gas field produced 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent last year, Shell’s executive vice president for exploration and production in Europe, Tom Botts, said in an interview in London today.

The 2009 production target is equal to about 67 million cubic meters of gas each day. Shell will drill three or four more wells to reach this target, Botts said. He said the field hadn’t stopped production once this year.

Ormen Lange is expected to meet as much as 20 percent of British gas demand for the next 40 years and is the main source of fuel for the Langeled pipeline from Norway.

StatoilHydro ASA holds 28.91 percent of the Ormen Lange development. Its partners are Shell (17.04 percent), Petoro AS (36.48 percent), Dong Energy AS (10.34 percent) and Exxon Mobil Corp. (7.23 percent).

To contact the reporter on this story: Eduard Gismatullin in London at egismatullin@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 17, 2009 07:16 EDT