TAQA UK has decommissioned 99% of its 164 wells within consent deadlines, according to a North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) league table published in December 2025. The industry average stands at 59%.

The figure anchors what Sandy Hutchison, Managing Director of TAQA UK, describes as the UK Continental Shelf's largest portfolio decommissioning programme, executed through a programme-level rather than asset-by-asset model. TAQA holds one of the largest decommissioning portfolios in the North Sea and is the only operator in the basin focused solely on late-life operations and decommissioning.

"Given the scale of our decommissioning responsibilities, it would have been easy to view the task one asset at a time," Hutchison writes in Oilfield Technology. "Instead, however, we chose to step back and engineer an approach built around a programmatic, portfolio level view of the task."

Why the portfolio model

The operator's infrastructure spans assets at interdependent stages of their life cycles — late-life operations, well plug and abandonment (P&A), preparation for removal, active removal, and post-removal activities. Decommissioning each asset individually, Hutchison argues, would force competition for the same limited resources: vessels, specialised personnel and facilities.

Managing the work as a single integrated programme avoids that fragmented resource allocation. The critical question, in Hutchison's framing, shifts from "How do we remove this platform?" to "How do we sequence dozens of complex scopes across multiple assets so that vessels, people, approvals and supply chain capacity are aligned, year after year, without interruption?"

TAQA argues the model delivers cost reduction through economies of scale, repeatability and learning transfer; supply chain resilience through long-term visibility of work; sustained demand for specialist skills; room to invest in new methods; and a route for UK companies to compete globally in large-scale decommissioning.

Planning began in 2017

Programme planning for all four Northern North Sea assets ceasing production in 2024 — and Central North Sea assets by 2027 — began in 2017, backed by major investment in feasibility studies covering the entire portfolio. TAQA engaged its supply chain, regulators and other stakeholders before tendering. Combined with transparent data sharing, the approach gave suppliers time to help design the programme itself rather than simply execute a client's design.

2025 delivery record

The 2025 work programme delivered a string of completed scopes across the portfolio. TAQA safely disembarked North Cormorant and reached Cessation of Production (CoP) and disembarkation on East Brae. A multi-year, multi-field subsea wells P&A campaign commenced, while platform P&A progressed on Brae Alpha and Cormorant Alpha.

In the Central North Sea, the operator completed de-energisation activities, flushing and isolating the Braemar, Devenick and East Brae pipelines. TAQA awarded the Brae Alpha EPRD (engineering, preparation, removal and disposal) contract and, in October, completed the Eider EPRD topsides removal.

Watch item

The next milestones sit in the Central North Sea, where TAQA's assets are scheduled to cease production by 2027. Sequencing of platform P&A, EPRD awards and removal campaigns across that portfolio — and whether the operator can hold its 99% consent-deadline compliance through the heavier removal phases — will test whether the programme model sustains its early delivery record.