Everyone's talking about decommissioning

In September 2022, we commenced our first offshore decommissioning project with Petrofac on the Northern Endeavour FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading) vessel.

The Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre, ageing oil production vessel, anchored 550 kilometres north-west of Darwin in the Timor Sea. 

Our scope in Phase 1 of the project includes the care and maintenance of the non-operating vessel and preparation for disconnection of the vessel from subsea equipment. Our project team will also be assessing hull repair and sea-fastening scopes to make the vessel safe for final disconnection and tow.  

We sat down with M&IS Energy Project Director, Peter Davis, to learn more about the complexities of offshore decommissioning and what we’ve achieved over the past nine months.  

“Decommissioning is a very broad term that means different things to people of different skill sets,” he said. 

“The term decommissioning implies cessation of production and making safe the equipment, but for an offshore facility it will extend to the decontamination, preparation for removal, final disconnection and subsequent containment or removal of subsea equipment and making safe of the wells. 

“The Northern Endeavour is an FPSO vessel making this process more straightforward than removing a fixed offshore platform, but this is a great project to demonstrate our team’s credentials and to expand into this new market,” he added.

Following a recent visit with Petrofac’s senior management team to the Northern Endeavour, Peter shared our customer was highly complimentary of our team, noting their outstanding positivity and integration with Petrofac’s personnel.  

Our venture into decommissioning, and success so far working on Northern Endeavour, has caught the attention of the Monadelphous executives with Doug Macintyre, Peter Davis and Wang-Wei Lau invited to present at the Company’s recent board meeting.  

According to the Centre of Decommissioning Australia, we can expect to see a significant amount of decommissioning work over the next few decades, providing exciting opportunities for Monadelphous. Watch this space...