Search Results (2)

There has been a steady growth in the length of pipelines over the past 45 years, with over 6000 operating platforms extracting oil. Several facilities would reach their operational life, which can no longer be economically viable for their production and will eventually undergo the decommissioning procedure. Almost 3000 petroleum industries will likely be decommissioned worldwide in the next 17 years. By 2030, the total cost of decommissioning globally amounted to about USD 104.5 billion. The choice to decommission the offshore oil and gas sector is considered complicated and crucial as it must evaluate numerous variables such as cost, health and safety, and environmental consequences. This review paper aims to assess the decommissioning activity, specifically on pipelines in the oil and gas industry. The purpose of this study is to understand and evaluate significant environmental impacts associated with decommissioning of oil pipelines and to propose mitigation measures to address the challenges of decommissioning. Waste disposal, a threat to biodiversity and air pollution, is a major environmental concern in decommissioning oil and gas pipelines. Among the decommissioning measures, leave in-situ has the lowest environmental impact while repurposing and recycling, with the application of environmental impact qualitatively and quantitatively by integrating 3D information models, mathematical models embedded in hydrodynamic models look promising for decommissioning. Full article

Offshore waste disposal facilities are unique marine infrastructures that exist only in a few countries. Although the existing facilities in Japan and Singapore have been successfully operated in general, there have been no investigations on the probable hazards they pose on the environment. Considering this, conceivable hazards were identified for an offshore waste disposal facility that has recently been proposed in Korea. The causes and consequences of each of the identified hazards were analyzed to seek countermeasures for reducing the environmental impact in advance. Hazards of waste disposal facilities can be classified according to their design, construction, maintenance, operation, and site utilization. For these areas, except for site utilization, subsystem hazard analysis was performed. In the initial assessment, seven elements were found to be in the extreme risk zone, 30 were in the high-risk zone, and six were in the moderate-risk zone. After applying the alternative mitigation methods, the final risk assessment resulted in 27 moderate-risk and 16 low-risk elements. Therefore, it was confirmed that the potential risks of the proposed offshore waste disposal facility were within acceptable ranges. Full article