The Petroleum Club of WA celebrated the leading lights of the
industry at its 2020 Industry Awards in November where it recognised the outstanding work of the technology development company
Hazer Group with the 2020 Gamechanger award.

Hazer is commercialising the HAZER Process, which enables
the effective conversion of natural gas and similar feedstocks
into hydrogen and high-quality graphite, using iron ore as a
process catalyst.

The Technical/ Trade Professional award went to safety professional
to AusGroup’s HSE Lead Daniel Zdraveski.

Santos petroleum engineer Emily Brooke received the Brooke Arnot Excellence Award for her contribution to the workplace, education, mentoring and not-for-profit sector.

Energy Minister Bill Johnston spoke of the challenges of decommissioning offshore infrastructure and the business opportunity
it represents to the oil and gas sector, which could leverage its knowledge and technical capacity as a future global decommissioning service centre.

“There are an estimated 380 petroleum-producing fields in the Asia Pacific that will cease production over the next decade,” Mr Johnston said. “Most recent cost analysis by Wood McKenzie for those decommissioning obligations has indicated that it may amount to $100 billion. We have the expertise and capability located here in West Australia to meet that enormous challenge of decommissioning that infrastructure across the globe, and in our region.”

National Offshore Petroleum and Environmental Management Authority head of safety and integrity Derrick O'Keefe, Department of Mines Industry Regulation and Safety executive director Resource and  Environmental Compliance Kate Caple,  and National Energy Resources Australia decommissioning project director Andrew Taylor delivered a regulators’ perspective of the decommissioning landscape in Australia.

WA has 708 active wells onshore (the bulk of these at Barrow Island); 319 wells in care and maintenance and more than 940 wells decommissioned. Offshore there are 18 active wells with 55 wells in care and maintenance and 367 decommissioned. Caple said the large pool of decommissioned assets pointed to a promising future to partner with industry to deliver positive outcomes.

Chevron TWI retirement project manager Chris Jones shared his decommissioning experiences in the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of five major hurricanes in the four years to 2008, which toppled 181 platforms.

“At the time Chevron stood up a hurricane restoration team for recovery of toppled and damaged infrastructure,” he said. “The initial plan was for that team to hang around for a few years cleaning up and then disband, but today, 15 years on, the team is still going and busier than ever.”

Mr Jones said the backlog of asset retirement work in the Gulf of Mexico was slowly being reeled in with an average of 150 platforms per year being decommissioned over the past ten years.

“But with the benefit of hindsight, I think it safe to say, that if given their time again, operators would have managed it very differently,” Jones said. “Within Chevron, the recovery cost was an impetus for the development of an asset retirement framework, which lays out a systematic approach to asset retirement at every stage of the asset life cycle.”

Mr Jones said decommissioning was high-risk work and exposes the workforce to infrastructure of unknown integrity and unknown weight, which were both very challenging factors to be working around on a daily basis.

“Uncertainty, surprises and imperfect information are the norm, things never go to plan in decommissioning,” he said.

Mr Jones urged companies to take a proactive approach to asset retirement as the liability was huge, the potential for cost overruns if executed late or poorly managed and on the flip side, the potential for cost savings if proactively managed.

The formal events concluded with a Q&A panel session with all the speakers moderated by Platform Communications director Kirsty Danby.

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