Decommissioning of Offshore Installations: Regulatory Aspects

Boost your skills in the highly topical area of decommissioning.

As UK and other offshore basins mature, decommissioning offshore infrastructure is creating new challenges for government and industry – and new career opportunities.

We’ll equip you with the knowledge and skills to address the regulatory aspects of decommissioning, covering international, domestic and comparative law.

Not just a course for lawyers, understanding the legal aspects of decommissioning is important for anyone involved in the process, including engineers and those involved in environmental impact assessments.

Attain sought-after expertise to advance your career in this rapidly developing sector, with a university proud of an unrivalled reputation in energy and law – and study flexibly, online, wherever you’re based.

What will I study?

This online decommissioning course focuses on the strategic decisions facing government and industry when offshore installations reach the end of their productive life.

The offshore decommissioning process in the North Sea area is governed by the Oslo Paris Convention (OSPAR), with each country contributing its own internal legislation regarding the decommissioning process and the taxation applied to it.

You’ll closely examine OSPAR and how this instrument of international law flows into UK law, the policy and practice of oil companies, and how we implement it.

Of course, it's not just the UK that’s facing issues of decommissioning, other states are too – and many of them are dealing with this issue in a radically different way. So, you’ll be engaging in comparative study and questioning what this area of law should look like.

OSPAR is noticeably different from most other international law devices. Is it better, is it worse? Is the UK system over-inclusive or the perfect model that should be implemented elsewhere? That's fundamentally what this course is all about.