Offshore jobs ‘could be lost abroad’

Tens of thousands of of decommissioning jobs at risk because of political prevarication, warns trade union

Oil and gas decommissioning work worth more than £50 billion that would support tens of thousands of jobs could go overseas because of a lack of government strategy and delays in decision-making, trade union GMB has warned.

According to the GMB, nearly 300 platforms need to be decommissioned and 4,000 wells plugged and abandoned over the coming years in the North Sea. Gary Smith, the GMB’s acting regional secretary in Scotland, said: “Decommissioning is lacking a clear strategy and we are concerned that it will be done ad hoc. The government lacks awareness of the opportunities. 

“If it’s left up to the market, this work will either go to the countries that are cheapest, like the scrapping of the ships does, and we’ll have the health and safety and environmental concerns that go with that. Or it will go to countries like Norway that already have a strategy for decommissioning.

“While the focus has been on the low oil price, it’s been very much crisis management. There has to be a long-term plan for the 60,000 jobs at stake.”

Estimates about the North Sea’s remaining oil and gas reserves vary between 15 billion boe (barrels of oil equivalent) and 24 billion boe. Industry also predicts the value of future decommissioning work to be between £30 billion and £50 billion.

The GMB, which represents workers for offshore contractors, said that the lifetime of oil and gas platforms should be extended where appropriate, but that it made “no logical sense to delay offshore decommissioning work”.

There have been about 10 major decommissioning projects in the North Sea in the past 20 years. Hundreds of firms throughout the oil and gas supply chain would be affected by any delays to decommissioning work. 

The industry’s trade association Decom North Sea has around 300 members, including companies such as Centrica, Babcock and Amec Foster Wheeler. 

Smith said that the latest energy bill being presented to MPs overemphasised the importance of carbon capture and storage  (CCS) in the industry. “We don’t want decommissioning to be held up by a debate over CCS,” he said. “We’re worried that amendments will focus on CCS at the expense of everything else.”

No one at the Department of Energy and Climate Change was available for comment.