Thinking outside the box holds the key to cleaning up the North Sea
By Scott Cormack, Mermaid Subsea Services (UK)
Decommissioning has long been the "nearly man" of the North Sea oil and gas industry.
Repeated delays to projects have meant that the much-touted, multi-decade pipeline of work that has long been promised has been repeatedly pushed back, and companies have fallen by the wayside as a result.
It has been a long time coming, but the telltale signs of a tangible market, one that you can truly build a business on, are now there to be seen.
Offshore Energies UK’s (OEUK) most recent Offshore Decommissioning Report 2024 forecasted expenditure of £24.6 billion (US$31.2 billion) by 2033, underlining significant growth in decommissioning activities across the period. That includes the removal of more than 2,000 wells, 914,000 tonnes of topsides and 508,000 tonnes of substructures.
Key achievements detailed in the report include the removal of more than 6,000 tonnes of subsea infrastructure in 2023, as well as a forecasted 50% increase in well decommissioning activities for 2024.
While it doesn’t cut the same striking visual as a mammoth platform being removed, transported and broken up onshore, well decommissioning is no less important.
As the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) notes, it accounts for just shy of half of the total cost of cleaning up the North Sea and is consistently the largest single cost category.
The industry has long been under pressure to cut the cost of decommissioning the basin’s assets and infrastructure.
In 2022 the NSTA re-baselined the estimated decommissioning cost to £37 billion ($47 billion), while simultaneously setting a new target with the industry to reduce costs by 10% by the end of 2028.
With 2025 now upon us, that deadline is approaching rapidly. Achieving it will entail operators, supply chain and regulators working together to deliver novel and innovative solutions right across the basin.
Case study
In 2024 Mermaid rounded out what is believed to be the largest vessel-based North Sea decommissioning campaign in history—a 21-well plugging and abandonment (P&A) campaign for a major operator—and it also set a new industry benchmark for P&A.
Across the course of the year, Mermaid successfully P&A and recovered 30 wells in the UK North Sea using a vessel, which is the highest number of vessel-based well decommissioning operations ever completed in a calendar year within the region.
Achieving this milestone was a mammoth undertaking for Mermaid, something the company is looking to build on in 2025. For the North Sea industry as a whole, it is just a snapshot of what will be required in the years to come.
The path forward
Research has shown that operators need to plug 200 abandoned North Sea oil and gas wells per year to stay on top of targets, all while dealing with the ongoing impacts of economic and fiscal uncertainty.
Delivering at the scale and speed requires the market to deliver innovative decommissioning models.
Operators are often accused of being unwilling to put their faith in decommissioning approaches that haven’t been tried and tested over many years, or companies that don’t have a decades long track record in the region.
But the appetite for new players and novel approaches is not just apparent, it is also essential for the success of North Sea decommissioning.
