Maintenance at UK's Buzzard oilfield set for Q2 and Q3 -Suncor

LONDON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Britain's biggest oilfield Buzzard will undergo routine, planned maintenance in the second and third quarters of 2014, Suncor, which owns a 29.9 percent stake in the field, said.

Buzzard is the biggest contributor to the Forties crude stream, one of the four crudes that underpins the Brent benchmark.

The market was already aware that the field would probably be down in early August for at least two weeks because of a full shutdown on the Forties Pipeline System, but the second quarter maintenance came as a surprise to participants.

Suncor mentioned the maintenance plans in its fourth quarter earnings release, which came out on Tuesday. No further details were given.

Buzzard has already experienced four unplanned outages this year, resulting in some delays to cargo loadings.

Nexen (KSE: 005720.KS - news) , Buzzard's operator and a unit of Chinese state company CNOOC (HKSE: 0883.HK - news) , has said that it aims to improve Buzzard's reliability in 2014.