Why Decommissioning + Innovation is a sensible equation

Let us focus on our home market to explain (it is of a certain age after all)...

Decommissioning currently accounts for a mighty 12% of UK offshore expenditure.

However, the North Sea Transition Authority estimates the total cost of the industry’s decommissioning bill has fallen by 25% in the last five years.

The estimated total cost of decommissioning UKCS upstream oil and gas infrastructure is now sitting at ￡44.5billion, from a figure of ￡59.7billion in 2017.

This has been achieved by continuous improvement in efficiency and cost reduction.

In other words: it’s been driven by innovation.

Clearly, if you keep doing the same thing, you keep getting the same result. But if you adapt, improve and innovate, you can tackle the challenge more efficiently.

And this saves not just money, but time and effort - plus, increased efficiency reduces the carbon footprint of operational activity.

A study by OEUK?found that there are still 125 topsides to be removed from the North Sea and 115 jackets to be decommissioned.

With ￡16.6bn to be spent on decommissioning over the next decade, there is plenty at stake to push this innovation in decommissioning.

It's really CleanCut

The North Sea has always been a fierce environment in which to work. MDL started over two decades ago, fixing and building equipment on fishing boats - so we're no stranger to the operational challenges associated with working in these harsh conditions.

And the challenges continue even past the field's working life, with the pressing need to safely and efficiently dismantle and remove the associated infrastructure. The UKCS needs an increasingly efficient decommissioning process.

In our last newsletter, we promised to show you some of the most exciting concepts that we have developed in response to challenges presented to us by our clients.

And here is one of these exciting concepts that is pushing innovation in decommissioning: the MDL CleanCut.

The design has taken the best features from our proven flex-lay technology and packaged them into a fully modular solution that can reduce the costs and increase the safety of conductor and caisson removal operations.

The system allows for lifting, cleaning, cutting and storing 12m lengths of caissons or conductors into convenient storage racks for easy transport to shore. The unique design of the system allows for removal of a complete conductor - from start to finish – within a single shift.

With its own generator and water supply, it is a completely self-contained system - which means it can operate on platforms that are completely offline or where cranes have been downrated.

Find out more about the ins and outs of?MDL CleanCut - scroll down the page for the explainer video.

Ready to go now

But there's more to decommissioning than removal of rigid infrastructure. In many cases the operation will focus on the flexible products - cables, risers, flowlines - which are, after all, our handling forte. No wonder then that we can readily engineer an efficient disposal solution.

Take this flexible cutting spread as an example. The approach was to apply systems from our rental fleet on a vessel of opportunity (again, our speciality) to form an automated package that can efficiently pull-in, cut and store sections of recovered product on deck in standard sized / flat rack containers - making them ready for road-transport to recycling or disposal site directly on return to port.

The spread can be scaled to the available back deck space, and facilitate either horizontal or vertical retrieval to allow for cleaning of the product before entering the back deck.

Read more on the engineering approach behind our?flexible cutting spread.

In both examples above, we combined our proven pipe-handling technology, offshore expertise and creative minds to engineer a targeted solution to address the latest challenges - those of our clients and of the wider industry.

That's how We Build Innovation.

Decommissioning is not the only on-trend topic challenging the industry just now... tune in next month to see how we tackle them!

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