Norway’s Sverdrup oilfield restores full output after outage

OSLO (Reuters) -Equinor has restored full output capacity at its Johan Sverdrup oilfield in the North Sea following an outage that drove up oil prices, and is now producing steadily at normal levels, a company spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Output was halted on Monday at western Europe’s largest oilfield due to an onshore outage that disrupted electricity supply to the platforms, boosting global oil prices.

Equinor early on Tuesday said two-thirds of oil output capacity was restored.

Production returned to full capacity later in the day, it said on Wednesday.

“The entire production facility at Johan Sverdrup resumed operations yesterday and is now producing steadily at normal levels,” the company spokesperson said.

Equinor last month said the field was producing at peak capacity of around 755,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed), although this was expected to gradually decline from early next year.

The power outage was caused by overheating in an electrical converter station at Kaarstoe in south-west Norway, Equinor has said.

The company did not believe that the incident was caused deliberately, it said on Tuesday.

Equinor is the operator and owns 42.63% of the Sverdrup licence while Aker BP holds 31.57%, Norwegian state-owned oil firm Petoro 17.36% and France’s TotalEnergies the remaining 8.44%.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, writing by Terje Solsvik, editing by Louise Rasmussen and Louise Heavens)