Norway's Equinor has halted output from its Johan Sverdrup oilfield, western Europe's largest, due to an onshore power outage, the company said on Nov. 18.

Oil prices rose on the news, adding to earlier gains stemming from escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Brent crude futures were up $1.88, or 2.65%, at $72.92/bbl by 1547 GMT, while U.S. WTI crude futures were at $68.8/bbl, 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 boe/d from early next year.

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 TotalEnergies holds the remaining 8.44%.

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