Rigorous decommissioning decision making with strong stakeholder engagement using comparative assessment

Abstract

Improving the robustness of decommissioning decision making will provide greater confidence in the decision and ensure stronger commitment to its execution. This can be achieved by putting some key principles into practice, including comparing a wide range of options against each other using a ‘decision model’ and actively engaging stakeholders in the decision process. Comparative assessment (CA) is a helpful approach to supporting robust decision making. Implementing CA through multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and decision conferencing is a powerful and proven way of putting such principles into practice. MCDA and decision conferencing involves ‘modelling’ the decision by articulating all outcomes (benefits, risks and costs – intangible and tangible) as a set of criteria and using a facilitated stakeholder group to evaluate options against one another. The group ‘scores’ options against the criteria, weights the criteria and then reviews the results, leading to a shared understanding of the issues and commitment to the way forward. CA has been widely used outside the oil and gas (O&G) sector for robust decision making; for example, the Royal New Zealand Airforce used CA to agree to the best solution for replacing their advanced pilot training capability. This led to clear, confident support for the preferred solution by the Treasury, and ultimately, cabinet ministers. CA is now starting to be used to support O&G decommissioning decisions, and one example is the use of CA by Shell and ExxonMobil to agree on the best course of action for decommissioning the storage cells of the Brent Delta platform.