Johan Sverdrup is Western Europe's largest oil field and has an offshore system that supplies electricity to production. After shutting down the field, Equinor has begun to repair the power outage.
"Remediation work has begun and we are developing a plan to resume operations," an Equinor spokesman told Reuters.
The incident at this major oil field could have an impact on oil prices, which fell 2% early on February 4 due to escalating trade tensions between the US and China.
The 10% tariff that the US imposed on all imports from China took effect on February 4, and on the same day, China announced retaliatory tariffs on US goods, including LNG, coal and crude oil.
Western Europe's largest oil field, Johan Sverdrup, began production in 2019. Peak production is expected to be 756,000 barrels per day in September 2024, significantly higher than the initial projection of 660,000 barrels per day. The field alone accounts for a third of Norway's total oil production.
Johan Sverdrup is estimated to have 2.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent in reserves and the entire field is now in production. Phase 1 of Johan Sverdrup was put into operation in October 2019 and phase 2 from December 2022.
According to Equinor, thanks to its high level of electrification, Johan Sverdrup has the lowest CO2 emissions of any oil field in the world.
The February 4 outage followed a similar outage in mid-November 2024, when Johan Sverdrup was shut down for several days until the problem was resolved.
