Decommissioning

The overall objective of this article is to analyze critically the legal instruments that regulate decommissioning of onshore and offshore platforms in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry vis-à-vis other jurisdictions such as USA, UK, and South Africa with a view to making requisite recommendations for improvement in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry. These recommendations are made against the backdrop of Nigeria’s experience of militancy in the Niger Delta Region between 1999 to 2015 which were necessitated by the complacency and poor or no Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mechanisms of the multi-national companies in the Region and weak oil and gas legislations in Nigeria. It is palpable that the militancy was engendered by political, religious, ethnic, and more importantly, economic reasons. The economic reason was anchored on 5 decades of irredeemable ecological devastation of the region by the oil companies exploration and exploitation activities. To this end, this work recommends that a comprehensive legal framework on decommissioning is urgently required to be enacted due to the fact that the 170 petroleum platforms in the Niger Delta Region are nearing their useful lifetime.

Converting unused offshore oil and gas installations into artificial reefs as one of the alternative methods of decommissioning, is used in many coastal states across the globe for the purposes of coastal management, enhancement and attraction of living marine resources, protection and preservation goals. Despite the positive impacts of artificial reefs, there are also potential negative impacts which require adequate maintenance of assets as well as, continuing monitoring and supervising. Although a lot of countries have comprehensive regulation on artificial reefs, many nations have blanket regulation requiring obsolete structures to be removed, yet it can bring about enormous environmental, socio-economic benefits. The sensitivity of deployment of structures as artificial reefs induced international and regional conventions to intervene and regulate the matter. The aim of this paper is to compare the most important international and regional conventions and critically compare and analysis them with the current Iran’s national laws and regulations. Iran is one of the biggest oil and gas producers and have a huge number of offshore installations which will require decommissioning in the coming years. Therefore, comprehensive national regulation should be enacted on decommissioning and also the possibility of creation artificial reefs. The authors seek out to evaluate the existing legislation in order to assess the potential capacity of Iran’s seas for converting the installations into artificial reefs.