Transforming Decommissioning Planning

The decommissioning of offshore oil and gas infrastructure is a key aspect in the life cycle of the facility and incurs a significant amount of cost. Decom North Sea was formed in 2010 with funding from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Scottish Enterprise and Highlands & Islands Enterprise (HIE) to focus on developing a robust supply chain that could deliver decommissioning. Since that time the organisation has moved to being fully funded by its members and has grown to have a membership in excess of 400 from the UK, across Europe and internationally. Only a small proportion of the UK Continental Shelf having been decommissioned, to date and current estimates predict expenditure to 2025 approaching £18bn (Oil & Gas UK Decommissioning Insights 2016). Industry member's organisation Decom North Sea - in collaboration with the UK Oil & Gas Authority, development agency Scottish Enterprise and representatives from a cross section of its member companies - has developed a web-based information portal to capture tools which have proven to add value while promoting advocacy in capturing good practices and lessons learned from the execution of decommissioning projects. Known as the Late Life Planning Portal (L2P2), the system was launched in 2016 and is likely to become the sole repository of information on the decommissioning of offshore oil and gas facilities, whilst helping to increase knowledge and learning for the industry and contribute to an overall increase in efficiency and reduction in the cost of decommissioning.