Oil firm Total to spend slightly less on Norway next year

STAVANGER, Norway (Reuters) - French oil firm Total will spend slightly less next year on the Norwegian continental shelf than it did this year, a senior company official told Reuters on Wednesday.

"What we're looking at is now the number of wells that we will have and of course we see that there's a significant shift in costs," Martin Borthne, a director for operations and projects at Total Norway, said in an interview.

"So the number of millions we're going to spend in 2016 is going to be slightly lower than in 2015, but still with a very high activity level."

The Martin Linge oilfield off Norway will start production in early 2018, a senior official told Reuters on Wednesday, from an original planned start in December 2016.

(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen, writing by Gwladys Fouche, editing by Terje Solsvik)