Norway: Siltanews – News Desk
Brent crude futures were up $1.88, or 2.65%, at $72.92 a barrel by 1547 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were at $68.8 a barrel, up $1.78 cents, or 2.66%.
An Equinor spokesperson said work was underway to re-establish production, but it was not immediately clear when it would resume.
The outage was caused by smoke developing in an onshore electricity converter station which sends power to phase 1 of the Johan Sverdrup development, the spokesperson added.
The situation was quickly clarified, but resulted in a temporary shutdown of production on the whole Johan Sverdrup field, he said.
The Sverdrup Phase 2 converter station, which supplies power to Sverdrup and other fields in the North Sea’s Utsira High area, was operating as normal, the spokesperson added.
Equinor said last month that it expected the Sverdrup field to come off peak production levels around 755,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from early next year. Equinor is the operator and owns 42.63% of the Sverdrup license while Aker BP (AKRBP.OL), opens new tab holds 31.57%, Norwegian state-owned oil firm Petoro 17.36%, and Total Energies (TTEF.PA), opens new tab holds the remaining 8.44%.