Managing Australia's Decommissioning Future and Building Regional Capacity

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the status of the Australian decommissioning industry and discusses actions and activities that are underway to ensure the industry is as prepared as possible for the growing volume of work it will face this decade. The paper also considers how the growing decommissioning workload can be managed across the region to deliver best in class outcomes and predictable outcomes for all involved. Driven by reservoirs reaching the end of their production life, the age of existing infrastructure and changes to legislation, the volume of decommissioning activity occurring and planned in Australia has increased significantly this decade. This increase in activity has highlighted several gaps in the readiness across industry; operators have been largely focused on new developments and production with decommissioning taking a lower priority, service sector companies have delayed preparing for decommissioning work due to ongoing uncertainty of workload, and regulators had not been exposed to large enough volumes of decommissioning applications for their personnel to be prepared. Since its establishment in 2020, the Centre of Decommissioning Australia (CODA) has been working to bring a greater focus on the opportunities and challenges facing industry as decommissioning becomes more common place. This has included CODA's initial work highlighting and quantifying the anticipated volumes and timeline of decommissioning works in Australia. Alongside producing the 2020 forward lookahead, CODA has also been developing reports, resources and tools to help Australian industry prepare for the US40. 5 billion of forecast decommissioning activity. Regionally, decommissioning workloads are also growing. There is an increasing global demand for skills and equipment, and a growing intersection and tension between offshore decommissioning and offshore wind. Pressures are building on the supply chain to service demand for decommissioning services in Australia, in the Asia Pacific region and globally. Now is the time to explore deeper regional cooperation on this critical final phase of the oil and gas production cycle.