Oslo — Norway’s Equinor halted on Tuesday all output from its Johan Sverdrup oilfield in the North Sea, western Europe’s largest producing field, due to an outage in the offshore power system, a company spokesperson said.
“Repair work has been initiated, and we are working on a restart plan,” the spokesperson said, without elaborating.
The outage could provide some support to oil prices, which were under pressure on Tuesday amid concerns about global demand as U.S. tariffs on China took effect.
Sverdrup pumped up to 755,000 barrels of oil per day in 2024. The company said last year that the field’s output was expected to come off this peak level in the early part of 2025, without elaborating.
Previous power outages affecting Sverdrup have also resulted in shutdowns of oil production.
Equinor is the operator and owns 42.63% of the uSverdrp licence, while Aker BP holds 31.57%, Norwegian state-owned oil firm Petoro holds 17.36%, and TotalEnergies holds the remaining 8.44%.
Reporting by Terje Solsvik and Nerijus Adomaitis. Editing by Louise Rasmussen and Mark Potter – Reuters
