Cost Elements of Offshore Platform Decommissioning in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to identify the cost elements of offshore platform
decommissioning in Malaysia. Decommissioning, specifically in Malaysia is still in
its infancy and immature phase compared to others region such as Gulf of Mexico and
North Sea where the operators there are experienced enough in conducting
decommissioning. Due to the lack of experience of decommissioning in Malaysia, the
operators are lacking of knowledge to conduct decommissioning especially in
determining the way to have a low cost decommissioning process. Moreover, there is
no study or literature about the cost elements has been published in Malaysia, even in
Southeast Asia as well. Therefore, this study basically identifies the cost elements of
decommissioning in Malaysia from set of interviews with representative from different
companies which have involved in any decommissioning projects. Then, the identified
cost elements are prioritized based on their impact towards the total cost of
decommissioning in order to identify the significant cost elements. It is followed by
analysing the significant cost elements which focus on justification of why the
elements are significant. At the end, few solutions are proposed in order to minimize
the impact of the significant cost elements towards the total cost of decommissioning.