Equinor says Arctic Castberg oilfield producing at peak capacity

OSLO (Reuters) -Norway’s Equinor said on Friday its Johan Castberg oilfield in the Arctic Barents Sea was producing at peak capacity of 220,000 barrels of oil per day.

Production at the field commenced on March 31 but was briefly offline in May for repairs following an outage.

The initial reserves for Johan Castberg are estimated at 450-650 million barrels, but could rise by another 250-550 million barrels with new wells continuing to be drilled, Equinor said.

Equinor is the operator of the Castberg field and owns a 46.3% stake, while Vaar Energi, controlled by Eni, and Norway’s Petoro have 30% and 23.7%, respectively.

(Reporting by Louise Breusch Rasmussen in Copenhagen and Nora Buli in Oslo, editing by Aidan Lewis and Tomasz Janowski)