PIECING A BILLION DOLLAR JIGSAW:

K.L. Na, H.E. Lee, N.A. Wan Abdullah Zawawi, M.S. Liew

Malaysia is home to over three hundred fixed offshore platforms and more than half of these assets are approaching their late-life operations. Once a platform is deemed no longer feasible for continued operations – which may be due to safety or economic reasons, among many others – a decision will have to be made on its next course of life. This is where the decommissioning process comes into play, being a niche right at the very end of a platform's life cycle intended to seek sustainable solutions in dealing with dis-used assets. It is, nonetheless, notoriously known for its association with delays and bloated costs; a reputation earned largely due to inefficient practices and lack of experience.

We believe that whilst this notoriety is warranted, the industry need not stay on the same path. If one would scrutinize the present state of affairs, various pieces of a holistic decommissioning jigsaw puzzle are already existent and strewn all over the offshore oil and gas sector. And what we need to do now is to piece them together. This exercise is long overdue for a country dealing with an increasing number of ageing assets, made especially pronounced with the recent sluggish oil prices which may actually create an environment that favours decommissioning. In perspective, a low oil price climate would seem at first sight to push decommissioning farther out of the picture but wha

We believe that whilst this notoriety is warranted, the industry need not stay on the same path. If one would scrutinize the present state of affairs, various pieces of a holistic decommissioning jigsaw puzzle are already existent and strewn all over the offshore oil and gas sector. And what we need to do now is to piece them together. This exercise is long overdue for a country dealing with an increasing number of ageing assets, made especially pronounced with the recent sluggish oil prices which may actually create an environment that favours decommissioning. In perspective, a low oil price climate would seem at first sight to push decommissioning farther out of the picture but wha