Decommissioning faces a hefty clean-up bill

The industry will spend tens of billions of dollars closing down old offshore fields

The global decommissioning market is yet to take off fully. But as provinces mature, as fields near the end of their life, companies are preparing for the inevitable. They are scrutinising their decommissioning plans, the regulatory and fiscal regimes governing decommissioning and the costs of completing that work. The oil-price crash has made the task more urgent. In mature regions like the UK, higher oil prices allowed mature fields to keep producing beyond their expected economic life, but the price drop brought the day of reckoning nearer. Over the past five years, almost 500 offshore fields globally have ceased production, with that number expected to rise to 735 fields from 2018 to 202