artificial reefs

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.