Reuse of decommissioned offshore steel components for new buildings: A case study

Abstract

Reuse process of structural steel members, which are extracted from decommissioned offshore platform, for new apartment building is presented in this paper. An index is introduced to assess the technical feasibility of the reuse process of offshore steel components to steel buildings. The applicability and significance of the reuse process is demonstrated by a real case study. Steel columns of a new four-storey apartment building are replaced by selected members from recently decommissioned offshore platform in this case study and hence feasibility, cost benefits and environmental advantages are investigated. Utilization ratios of selected pre-used columns shows that those columns have more than sufficient capacities to withstand the loads. This indicates that considered decommissioned module of offshore topside is applicable for similar size of new buildings. The results indicate significant environmental benefits such as reduction of the CO2 emission, low global worming potentiality, and etc. The reusability index of the considered case study is 51.5%, which shows marginal feasibility of reuse, and this can be increased, if the reuse process is industrialized and streamlined by the offshore decommisioning companies. Three ways are proposed to industrialize and streamline the reuse process in the latter part of this paper.