Equinor prepares to restart Sverdrup, western Europe’s largest oilfield

OSLO (Reuters) -Equinor has restored power supply to the Johan Sverdrup oilfield, Western Europe’s largest, following an outage, and is preparing to restart petroleum output, a spokesperson for the Norwegian firm said on Thursday.

“Power supply from shore has been restored and preparations to restart Sverdrup’s production are ongoing,” the spokesperson said.

A power outage around 1100 GMT led to a controlled shutdown of the North Sea field, which produces around 535,000 barrels of oil per day, the spokesperson said.

The company declined to comment on when production would resume and how long it would take to ramp up to full output.

Sverdrup, which began production in 2019, is one of a growing number of Norwegian oilfields powered by electricity from shore, unlike many older fields which use natural gas and diesel generators for operations.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik and Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Gwladys Fouche, Elaine Hardcastle and Jonathan Oatis)