Oil and Gas Decommissioning Australia

Australian law requires oil and gas companies to clean up after themselves. This is known as decommissioning—it means once corporations have finished extracting fossil fuels from an area they are required to remove all the equipment that has been installed. Things like drilling rigs, pipelines and platforms that have been left in the ocean or on the seafloor. They agree to this when they start a project.

Yet companies are doing everything possible to avoid cleaning up the ocean and they are leaving infrastructure that then rusts and degrades. It has the potential to release oil spills and toxic chemicals and gets increasingly more dangerous for workers to either maintain or remove.

Why are they avoiding the cleanup? It comes down to money—it is an expense the companies don’t want to have to cover. After making massive profits from extracting fossil fuels they want to avoid paying for the cleanup. It is estimated that the oil and gas industry has a $60 billion and rising clean up bill coming, and it is doing everything it can to avoid getting it done.

One company has already cut and run, declaring bankruptcy and leaving the Australian government with the mammoth task of cleaning up the Northern Endeavour platform in the northern waters of Australia.

The Wilderness Society has joined environmental organisations from across Australia, alongside the Maritime Union of Australia, to call for stronger regulation from Australia’s oil and gas regulator (NOPSEMA) to ensure offshore fossil fuel companies are cleaning up their old operations and the Australian tax payer is not left to foot the bill

Corporations avoiding oil and gas decommissioning is a big problem:

1. The marine environment suffers. Australia's sublime oceans are being put at risk by vast volumes of steel, concrete and other materials, including heavy materials, chemicals and radioactive substances. When this infrastructure is poorly maintained and left in place beyond its use-by date, there is a high risk it will fail. Old and decaying infrastructure can cause leaks, spills and contamination of the ocean.

2. Workers are forced to work on decaying and dangerous infrastructure that puts their safety at risk. In recent years there have been several near fatalities of workers on infrastructure that should have been removed years ago.

3. Australia misses the huge opportunity to recycle valuable resources and create jobs for offshore oil and gas workers as the extraction side of the offshore oil and gas industry winds up and is replaced by removing and recycling vast quantities of materials.

4. The Australian government and Australian taxpayer risks being left to clean up and pay for the oil and gas industry’s mess if it’s not done while these companies are profitable. This is exactly what happened when Woodside sold the Northern Endeavour for a dollar to the Northern Oil and Gas Australia group of companies, which promptly went broke.

ExxonMobil’s Bass Strait oil and gas operations between Victoria and Lutruwita / Tasmania are some of the oldest in Australia, with many wells, pipelines and platforms long overdue for clean up.

ExxonMobil’s plan to cut corners on its clean up and dump 15,000 tonnes of steel from eight ageing and disused oil platforms are the focus of the Rothwell Advice commissioned by the Wilderness Society.

The Rothwell Advice, from eminent and globally renowned legal and law of the sea expert Professor Donald Rothwell, states unequivocally that ExxonMobil’s disused oil and gas structures must be removed from the Bass Strait.

Old and decaying infrastructure is both a navigational hazard and a threat to the marine environment. Between April and August 2024 alone, there were three separate spills at ExxonMobil’s Bass Strait operations.

The Wilderness Society has provided the Rothwell Advice to Australian Government regulators, and we’ll be monitoring the situation to ensure ExxonMobil cleans up after itself in the Bass Strait.