Timing of abandonment and decommissioning of oil and gas facilities is a function of remaining reserves, production, revenue and costs. Fiscal considerations may also have an impact, as will host government requirements to put into place financial guarantees to cover the costs of decommissioning.
In many respects, a decommissioning project is simply a construction project in reverse, with one notable exception, to be discussed later.
As a project, the phased and gated approach to project definition and execution, described in our Project Delivery pages, would be applicable, and recommended.
The notable exception is, of course, managing the environmental issues associated with decommissioning and disposal of oil and gas production facilities.
In most countries, there are clear guidelines and legislation. To this end, EPEn would apply our processes associated with Environment Impact Assessments to decommissioning projects in order to better understand the scope of disposal requirements.
