New Guidance to Help in Decom Planning Released

An industry workgroup has issued new guidance aimed at helping companies to plan decommissioning more efficiently, Oil & Gas UK informed.

Common Data Access (CDA), the Oil & Gas UK subsidiary, has worked with the Shell Brent Decommissioning Project and the School of Law at the University of Aberdeen to create the first publicly available ‘records retention schedule’ for use in oil and gas decommissioning.

It is aimed at helping operators determine what information must be retained after an offshore installation has been removed from the field.

Daniel Brown, manager, CDA Projects, said: “A freely available records retention schedule is a first for the oil and gas industry, and we hope it will prove a great time saver as companies seek to meet their legal obligations while recognising their individual business drivers to retain or dispose of asset information.

“We hope companies find the schedule and guidance useful in helping them increase the efficiency of their decommissioning planning while avoiding the substantial cost of retaining asset data and documentation for years longer than needed.”