<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/decommissioning-or-decomposing-oil-and-gas-giants-in-hot-water-over-retired-assets/>
"Woodside and Santos are in hot water over their plans to clean up old oil and
gas infrastructure as a new lawsuit questions whether there is enough money to
cover remediation work and the regulator has intervened over several safety
incidents.
On Friday the Wilderness Society filed a lawsuit challenging a decision by the
National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority
(NOPSEMA) to approve an Environment Plan submitted by oil and gas producer
Santos to decommission infrastructure on an offshore gas field in northern
Western Australia.
Reindeer-1 is an abandoned wellhead in a gas field in open water about 80km off
the coast of Dampier, near Barrow Island. It includes three well-heads and
feeds the Devil’s Creek gas pipeline.
As production on the field has ended, Santos proposed its infrastructure be
“left in a preserved state for future phases”. The Environment Plan describes
these “future phases” as “decommissioning, or repurposing”.
The Wilderness Society’s lawsuit challenges whether Santos has the money to
cover the work and alleges the regulator did not ask the company to prove
whether it can financially carry the cost of decommissioning the platform and
remediating any environmental harm.
Fern Cadman, fossil fuel industry campaigner with The Wilderness Society, said
that unlike hard rock mining, the Australian oil and gas industry has never had
to plan for decommissioning and remediation costs during set up.
“What we’re seeing across the oil and gas sector is companies using every
excuse they can to delay clean up and decommissioning, because there’s no real
commercial value in decommissioning,” Cadman said.
“We’re really concerned that with company’s delaying clean up, and with no
money set aside because the industry was never made to pay bonds, we’re worried
they will cut and run, and the environment will be left with infrastructure
full of toxic chemicals.
“These companies were given access to resources, they’ve made a lot of money
out of them, their one promise was to clean up when they were done. Now the
question is: do they actually have the money to do it?
“From what the Wilderness Society can see from publicly available information,
it’s not clear that they do.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
