decommissioning

The next big wave of decommissioning and abandonment projects is set to occur in the Asia-Pacific region, and APAC’s operators are now tasked with finding cost- and time-effective ways of unwinding their huge agglomeration of wells and facilities.

Many operators are taking a full-life-cycle approach to preparing for decommissioning—a shift borne of necessity amid cost and regulatory constraints.

With no money to be made, P&A is one area where operators can put aside their hyper-competitiveness to work together. Members of the recently formed PACE network discussed the virtues of collaboration at the Decommissioning and Abandonment Summit 2018.

A panel of UK government officials and industry executives discuss opportunities to increase efficiency in North Sea decommissioning programs.

A new university-led consortium aims to bring together industry and academia to help operators efficiently orchestrate the final days of deepwater developments.

With regulatory pressure and the cost of decommissioning increasing, many operators are seeking new and better decommissioning methods that could get more work done safely and at a lower cost.

A team of oil and gas consultancy companies have formed a collaborative program aimed at offering integrated support for operators looking to retire redundant facilities without in-house overhead.

The global industry is feeling the pain of the oil price plunge, but the UK feels it more acutely. Exploration drilling is at rock bottom levels, the offshore UK Continental Shelf is one of the world’s most expensive from which to produce a barrel of oil, and investment spending is expected to fall.

In a down market, plugging and abandoning North Sea wells looks like an opportunity. The cost for operators is reduced because the government is paying more than half of the cost of the work, and many service companies hungry for work are offering discounts.

Decommissioning costs are often made higher by decisions made during the initial engineering and construction stages of an offshore oil or gas field. Designing with a critical eye can go a long way toward reducing the decommissioning costs, which occur decades later.