Decom North Sea – May 2019 – By John Warrender

Since its inception in 2010, Decom North Sea has been committed to reflecting the evolving demands of the oil and gas sector. To begin with, our focus was on conveying the status of the decommissioning industry, acting with our originating partners, to reflect a developing market. Over the last nine years the relationship between operators, regulators and the supply chain has become the dominating factor in decommissioning governance and execution and with that, our membership and its requirements have changed. As we enter our tenth year, our overarching objective is to develop our member proposition to match those changing needs.

From a day-to-day perspective, we have implemented a “key account management” strategy for all members. This provides a point of contact for each member, making it easier for our members to access us, whilst enhancing our ability to ensure they’re aware of - and making the most of - our valuable member services.  

As befits an organisation with lots of market data to share, we have been working to improve our web-based membership services. A significant part of this project has been the introduction of an updated and improved Decom Directory, which will be launched at Decom Offshore, and the completion of a pilot study to develop a new approach to accessing decommissioning knowledge via a digital knowledge hub.

A critical part of our remit is to represent our members on a number of levels. To that end, we continue to develop our Decommissioning Leadership Group (DLG) and its associated Special Industry Work Groups, which are already assisting our members to gain traction on issues shared by the industry. Equally, we focus in on the integration between ourselves and other trade associations, government agencies and regulators, providing enhanced relationships and consistent access to relevant knowledge.

It is also our responsibility to demonstrate authoritative influence at senior levels within the sector, giving all members better access to the decision makers and policy makers. A topical example of this is our significant contribution to the recent Call for Evidence on the UK as a Decommissioning Hub.

Spanning all our development work is the aim to expand the reach of the Decom North Sea brand. Despite our name, we’ve always appreciated that decommissioning is a global industry, and have encouraged overseas links. Now with a specific focus on internationalisation, we are cultivating our existing links with government development agencies to arrive at a more integrated approach to international market intelligence, and the access we can secure for our membership.

Reflecting this, our annual conference, Decom Offshore (29 May), includes a session which will focus around internationalisation, in addition to speaker and panel sessions on the Operator Perspective, the Human Face of Decommissioning and Aggregation/ Economies of Scale. We will also be providing attendees with unprecedented access to operator challenges and opinions, through plenary presentations from senior leaders and decision makers plus a ‘question time’ session on significant sector issues.

Based on industry feedback, this event focuses on sector challenges that are 100% topical and 100% relevant to anyone engaged in decommissioning. With a limited number of delegate spaces still available, I would urge you to book now.

www.decomnorthsea.com/events