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NOPSEMA's decommissioning strategy, plan and performance

NOPSEMA is implementing a five-year decommissioning compliance strategy to ensure consistency, transparency and certainty of decommissioning obligations. The goal is to ensure decommissioning is completed by titleholders in a timely, safe, and environmentally responsible manner.

determining compliance actions

The NOPSEMA Decommissioning Compliance Plan outlines the actions NOPSEMA will take to achieve these strategic objectives and identifies the types of regulatory actions that titleholders can expect NOPSEMA to consider, depending on the risks presented by each case.

NOPSEMA assigns each production facility (“activity”) to one of four tiers, ranging from high to low levels of regulatory oversight. These tiers are based on the status of the activity and potential risks to timely, safe, and responsible decommissioning.

Decommissioning research strategy

NOPSEMA encourages collaboration between the government, industry and research bodies to fill knowledge gaps for decommissioning in Australia.

NOPSEMA believes there is an opportunity for industry to take a more collaborative and transparent approach to addressing common research priorities. Doing this will allow government and industry to utilise resources more effectively to meet the needs of a broader suite of end-users. It will also allow effective tailoring of research outputs to support offshore activity management, including decommissioning and regulatory approvals processes.

NOPSEMA has published a Research Strategy to provide industry with a clear vision for enhanced research outcomes, including NOPSEMA's goals and role in supporting that vision. The research strategy identifies a range of research questions that, if answered, will benefit both industry and government in achieving better decommissioning outcomes.

NOPSEMA also collaborates with a range of research organisations to collaborate regarding future research opportunities and to stay informed on the latest scientific developments.

Progress against general directions

In line with the decommissioning compliance plan, NOPSEMA has issued statutory general directions and/or formal requests for revisions to permissioning documents to all tier one projects.

NOSPEMA actively monitors compliance with these enforcements and continues to oversee and influence titleholders to achieve safe and environmentally responsible decommissioning within the timeframes set in the directions.

Titleholders are obliged to report on progress against some directions annually and to publish those reports, which are available on each titleholder’s website.

Page last updated: March 22, 2023 8:23am