Flvia Kaczelnik Altit, Mark Osa Igiehon

decommissioning. However, detailed guidelines do not yet exist and are not settled
in many regions. Furthermore, many jurisdictions are yet to establish full
complements of national statutes and regulations on decommissioning. Even in
those jurisdictions with extant statutes, some of those statutes are now clearly
inadequate and need to be revisited, with more thoroughgoing regulation put in
place.
Although, as seen above, international law on offshore decommissioning is now
well settled, the status of the IMO Guidelines and Standards 1989 is still somewhat
unclear, as it could be argued that those guidelines have been rendered redundant by
OSPAR Decision 98/3. There is a need for the International Maritime Organisation to
reassess the status, utility and continued use of the IMO Guidelines and Standards.
This is unfinished business.
In the United Kingdom at least, there are questions regarding the complex and
onerous obligations placed by the national decommissioning legislation. This
complexity has led to multiplication and duplication of security arrangements
among upstream parties. There are ongoing efforts by both the government of the
United Kingdom and the oil industry to bring about needed changes. The UK
government has now passed the Energy Act 2008 with wide-ranging changes to
aspects of existing legislation on decommissioning. But this remains unfinished
business.
The least that can be concluded is that although decommissioning is now better
understood and well provided for in many jurisdictions, compared with the state of
knowledge and legislation in 1995 when the Brent Spar episode occurred, the
number and magnitude of issues yet to be resolved and concluded (relating to legal,
regulatory, technical and engineering, financial and tax challenges) across many
regions and jurisdictions demonstrates that decommissioning will continue to be the
subject of considerable legal, legislative and technical activity in the near future.

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