Review OEUK Offshore Decommissioning Conference

A Nexstep delegation has participated with around 450 other delegates in the Offshore Energies UK annual Decommissioning Conference in St. Andrews from 20 to 22 November – to discuss the industry’s prospects and challenges and network with those who are experts in the field.

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘delivering decommissioning’ – sharing opportunities, successes and lessons to explore how operators, regulators and the supply chain can collaborate for effective decommissioning. Nexstep General Manager Thijs Starink has presented the successful outcome of the Joint Well Campaign, a collaboration between 6 Dutch Operators to abandon 30 Mud Line Suspended wells in the Dutch North Sea.

Several operators from the UK, NL and US have shared outcomes and learnings of their decommissioning work. The trend is that the decommissioning sector has executed more projects and spent more money than ever before and expenditure level for the next 10 years is around 2 billion GBP/yr in the UK alone. Furthermore, Petrogras shared plans to start a USD10 billion decommissioning scope, partly in shallow water similar to the North Sea where they see a large learning opportunity. Also the Dutch operators have shown a growing activity level with the execution of the Joint Well Campaign and several other operator campaigns.

Furthermore, there were sessions on Regulating and Influencing the delivery of decommissioning by UK authorities and an interactive session on Environmental Perspectives to decommissioning with representatives from Scottish Fisheries Federation and Greenpeace.

OEUK’s 2023 Decommissioning Insight report, launched at the conference, examines the wider North Sea so that there is basin-wide visibility for the decommissioning market. It also contains an overview of the decommissioning scope in the Netherlands and a case study on the completion of the Joint Well Campaign initiated and managed by Nexstep (see page 43).

Nexstep is continuing the work to reduce the decommissioning cost by stimulating re-use, collaboration, sharing learnings, driving innovation and promoting efficient regulations.