Many oil and gas companies, in the current context of the energy transition, have the ambition to develop a circular-economy framework that ranks the options for dealing with waste, beginning with the reduction of its generation, through consideration of management possibilities, to the reuse or recycling of materials and components.
Eni has developed a new culture of circular decommissioning with the main goal of setting up a structured process to improve environmental performance by implementing the principles of a circular economy during decommissioning.
The initiative is aimed at moving all discipline functions toward a circular-economy culture of reuse and maximizing assets’ residual life. For this reason, during the preliminary stages of an asset’s life cycle, feasibility studies are usually conducted to select the preferred decommissioning method from an environmental point of view and provide an early evaluation of the benefits of recycling residual materials.
A circular economy is an alternative to a linear economy, where resources are taken from the environment and materials, components, and equipment are used generally for a short period of time before being disposed at the end of their life cycle with a negative environmental impact. A circular economy has the primary objective of maximizing waste prevention and optimizing environmental, technical, and social benefits.
Many operators have the ambition to adopt circular-economy principles in their processes with the main goal of getting better use out of resources, limiting carbon emissions, and promoting the use of renewable materials and energy. In the past 2 years, Eni has developed a new standard of circular decommissioning aimed at adopting a circular culture that improves environmental performance—in other words, reducing the amount of waste materials through the reuse or recycling of components. This approach, described in the complete paper as the 3R approach—reuse, recycle, and reduce—will have considerable importance in the near future as the portfolio of highly complex decommissioning projects increases. The approach is supported by a company culture that shifts the perception of decommissioning from a liability to a regeneration opportunity, leveraging two fundamental pillars—the circular economy and assets-value maximization.