OGUK Decom Insight Report 2021

5. The Wider North Sea Perspective

5.1 A look at North Sea activity over the next decade The UK does the most North Sea decommissioning work – Decommissioning in the UK accounts for 67% of the North Sea’s well decommissioning workload, 69% of the topsides removal tonnage and 68% of the substructure decommissioning tonnage. North Sea well decommissioning remains steady over the next decade – Over 200 wells are forecast to be decommissioned each year across the North Sea with 2,679 wells in total. 528 wells are to be decommissioned in the Netherlands, 278 wells in Norway and 91 in Denmark. Again, there are spikes in the dataset for 2021, 2023 and 2026 in an otherwise smooth portfolio of work. Topsides decommissioning activity is steadily rising over the next decade – Just over 1 million tonnes of topsides infrastructure will be removed over the next decade, up from 900,103 tonnes as stated in Decommissioning Insight 2020 . There is a general increasing trend in topsides decommissioning with just under 60,000 tonnes to be removed in 2021, rising to almost 160,000 tonnes in 2029 before dropping back to just over 120,000 tonnes in 2030. Again, most of the topsides comes from the UK sector, with Netherlands scopes starting to rise from 2023, and a few large Norwegian scopes slated for the end of the decade. A game of two halves for North Sea substructure decommissioning – A steady workload of substructure decommissioning is anticipated for the North Sea where between 20,000 and 40,000 tonnes are expected to be decommissioned between 2021 and 2025. The activity then peaks in 2026, with a few large projects forecast to take place in the UK and Norway. The workload in the latter half of the decade remains high at above 70,000 apart from 2028 where just under 50,000 tonnes are forecast to be decommissioned.

Survey methodology Data have also come fromother countries around the North Sea, namely Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark. Data from the Netherlands came from Nexstep, a joint initiative of the state-owned Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN) and the Dutch oil and gas industry, represented by NOGEPA. OGUK also collected data directly from three operators in Denmark. For the first time, data from Norway were collected by Norsk Olje Og Gass (NOROG), a trade association representing the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The data came from a record eight operators, allowing greater insights as detailed in this section.

DECOMMISSIONING INSIGHT 2021

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