The IOGP has just published Volume 2 of its Report 585 on international offshore decommissioning regulations. Volume 2 covers plugging and abandonment. (Volume 1, published earlier this year covers facilities). The new volume reviews the national legislation and guidelines for offshore P&A for some 35 countries. Volume 1 is available here https://www.iogp.org/bookstore/product/overview-of-international-offshore-decommissioning-regulations-volume-1-facilities/.
NSTA, the North Sea Transition Authority, has launched a digital platform through which operators can submit and update their supply chain action plans. SCAPs contain important information about operators’ contracting activities. The SCAP reporting process was rolled out in January 2018 after an NSTA study showed that poor engagement with suppliers was contributing to North Sea projects being delivered late and over budget. SCAPs help the NSTA monitor changes in costs, find gaps in supply chain capability, promote best practice and identify lessons learned. A SCAP is now mandatory for all field development and decommissioning projects. More than 200 have been lodged with the NSTA since the process began. More from the NSTA.
NSTA reports take-up for the UK Energy Technology Platform (UKETP) with users up 67% to 892. The hike followed the provision of a £27,500 grant to allow suppliers and operators use the portal for free for a six month period during which UK suppliers added 69 technologies to the site, taking the global total to more than 660. A further £30,000 grant has been made available to allow users to enjoy continued free access for six months, to 15 November 2023.
NSTA has also ‘relaunched’ WONS, the wells operations notifications system. WONS allows operators to submit online applications and notifications for well activity. NSTA can then give submissions proper technical scrutiny before issuing consent. The new portal includes permitting for carbon storage licenses and allows users to record more detailed information on the identity and role of companies responsible for the wellbore and associated data.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) is to update NEMS, its National Energy Modeling System. NEMS I used to produce the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook. New requirements to include emerging technologies and fuels such as hydrogen production and transport, carbon capture and seasonal energy storage mean that the model needs a refresh. Consequently, the AEO will not be published in 2024. The 2025 AEO will better address existing laws and regulations in the reference case, including up-to-date provisions in the inflation reduction act and regulatory actions that could be finalized in the coming months.
The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) has approved Resolution 23.053 from Texas Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright who urged the US Department of the Interior to follow the statutory language passed by Congress with respect to the Federal Orphan Well Plugging Program. Wright was pushing for the use of taxpayer dollars to utilized to plug as many orphan wells as possible.
The Geological Survey of the Netherlands has issued a new, artificial intelligence-derived seabed sediment map of the North Sea. The map is intended to support activities such as shipping, fishing, construction and operation of wind farms, cable trenching and pipeline construction. AI has allowed researchers to capture the ratio of sand, mud, and gravel in a grid model for all 58,500 square kilometers of the Dutch North Sea bed. Making the map involved ‘state-of-the-art techniques and enormous computing power’.
The Australian Research Data Commons has been working on a 2030 Geophysics Collections project to make the large volumes of geophysical data that have been acquired by universities, industry and government agencies since the 1950s more accessible. The project makes raw, high-resolution versions of AuScope-funded magnetotelluric and passive seismic data accessible online, compliant with FAIR and CARE principles, and integrated with existing government datasets at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). The datasets are suitable for programmatic access in high-performance computing environments at NCI. They lay the foundations for more rapid data processing by 2030 for next-generation, scalable and data-intensive computation, including data assimilation and computation using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
A report, ‘The value of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s data’, prepared by Menon Economics for the NPD underscores its value. Poster child for the NPD is the Johan Sverdrup field, discovered by Lundin in 2010 using old seismic and well data in Diskos. Now production income from the field is estimated at NOK 1,430 billion over 50 years. The report leverages data on how companies are using the data and shows how NPD’s data is still key to providing operators with a greater understanding of the subsurface, supporting value creation on the shelf. Currently NPD manages almost 15 petabytes of data. The Report (in Norwegian) can be downloaded here.
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