At Oil & Gas UK and Decom North Sea’s Decommissioning Conference in St Andrews in November there was a presentation about the potential for decommissioning to contribute to the circular economy, and in particular the need to move our focus from recycling to re-use.
It's not the type of “decommissioning” work normally seen, but a video has emerged online of parts of old oil platforms being blown up with explosives.
A Norwegian yard owner and a Dutch heavy lift crane vessel operator have signed the contract to decommission a UK North Sea platform.
A Chinese state-owned maritime giant which completed the largest single-lift sea salvage operation in history will today open the doors to its first UK office in Dundee.
The UK Government will be lumbered with liability for oil fields as operators transform or disappear completely over the coming decades, an industry commentator has said.
Higher oil prices and industry’s “relentless focus” on efficiency have pushed decommissioning projects further into the future, a flagship report said.
Scotland’s first ultra-deep-water (UDW) port would have to secure 10 decommissioning projects to pay for itself, a flagship report said.
Nearly £1 billion worth of security has been squirreled away to protect UK taxpayers from being slapped with excessive decommissioning bills, a UK Government official said.
Scotland's energy minister will launch the annual Offshore Decommissioning Conference in St Andrews today.
Aberdeen Harbour Board has said its £350million extension project will “revolutionise” the way quayside work is carried out, especially for decommissioning operations.
A decommissioning specialist has taken a step closer to setting up a scrapping facility at the Fife-based birthplace of numerous oil rigs.
An ambitious bid to build the UK’s largest heavy lift offshore decommissioning vessel could create up to 500 jobs for Tayside and leverage tens of millions of pounds of inward investment into the city.
Oil industry bosses are more vigorously questioning whether current rules for leaving installations in the North Sea are fit for purpose, an Aberdeen academic said.
This week Greenpeace provided written evidence to the Future of the Oil and Gas Industry, Commons Select Committee. The topic was decommissioning and the position Greenpeace presented was one of support for OSPAR 98/3.
As we stressed in our evidence to the Select Committee, in continuing to support the removal of offshore oil and gas installations at end of life, Greenpeace is in line with the approach to decommissioning that was only months ago reaffirmed by all 15 countries that are party to the OSPAR Convention, including the UK.
Unanswered legal questions on North Sea decommissioning, including the potential cost to the taxpayer, will be addressed at an industry event tomorrow.
Keeping old oil and gas platforms in place could be a “triple win” for the North Sea, creating a fresh wave of employment, according to a conservationist group.
Dales Voe has been named as the preferred location for the UK’s first ultra deep-water port and has an approved planning application to increase the decommissioning capabilities on site, opening up a unique opportunity for North Sea operators in the region.
Ardent, the premier marine salvage, emergency response and decommissioning contractor, has completed the design of an external buoyancy system called Archimedes, to recover jackets.
Perhaps it’s the overtly political nature of it, the multiplicity of stakeholders, the need for problem-solving or the sheer finality of it, but offshore decommissioning has been an area of interest to me since I first joined Return To Scene in 2013.
With UK decommissioning expenditure estimated at £55.7 billion, it’s no surprise that this offers a significant opportunity for many companies. From a well abandonment perspective alone, activity is set to increase from £1.2bn in 2016 to an expected £1.5–2bn per year through to 2025, according to Oil and Gas UK (OGUK).
For the uninitiated, there may not be any obvious connections between North Sea decommissioning and Crossfit – a high-intensity fitness programme – however Oil and Gas UK’s (OGUK’s) new decommissioning manager sees things differently.
Buoyancy systems, laser cutting tools and thermite plugs all feature in a combined effort by industry and academia to turn the north-east into the world’s leading provider of decommissioning technology.
Decommissioning is now a significant part of the landscape of activity in the UKCS – annual decommissioning expenditure has topped £1 billion since 2015 and may come close to £2bn when Oil and Gas UK reports its estimate for 2018 later this month.
Demand for decommissioning services in Aberdeen Harbour have been steadily growing for several years now – but in 2018 the port has been a hive of decom activity. Nearly 2,000 tonnes of material has crossed the quayside from high-profile projects, such as the Maersk Leadon and Janice, and Shell’s Brent Alpha projects. The Harbour has also accommodated materials inbound from Nexen’s Plug and Abandonment Programme.