OSLO (Reuters) - A drifting barge was about an hour away from hitting BP's oil installations at the Valhall oilfield in the North Sea, a spokesman said on Thursday.

When asked about the risk of an oil spill, company spokesman Jan Erik Geirmo said: "It depends on which platform the barge hits as there are several installations in the field, but there is no oil stored on the platforms, it's transported by pipelines."

The remaining platform staff was expected to be evacuated within the next 15 minutes, he told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by William Hardy)