Sustainable Decommissioning of Offshore Platforms: a Proposal of Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit Analysis in ItalianOil and Gas Industry

The decommissioning of offshore Oil & Gas platforms, at the end of their life cycle, has been a very controversial topic in recent years. Moreover, the decommissioning complexity increases if we consider a shift towards a linear economy to a circular one. The latter pushes to innovate business models and re-configure the value chain activities in a sustainable way. Starting from these considerations, this work aims to identify a cost-benefit model suitable for evaluating sustainable business models of offshore platforms. After a literature review of different models for analysing maintenance and decommissioning Real Options (ROs), the Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit (LCCB) analysis has been selected as the most adequate managerial tool for evaluating and comparing the Net Present Value (NPV) of platforms compared the maintenance and decommissioning costs. The LCCB tool could aid the managers in the oil and gas industry to quantify the decommissioning and maintenance costs including capital expenditure (CapEx) and risk expenditure (RiskEx). In the future steps, to test the LCCB model, an empirical analysis could be carried out on a sample of organizations interested in the sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms.