decommissioning

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regulations are driving increased decommissioning activities in the Gulf of Mexico. Incomplete data is one of the obstacles in planning decommissioning. As fields have changed ownership over time, key information has been lost, creating challenges for the current operator.