Ed Miliband wind turbine attack It threatens to leave the North Sea littered with rusted oil rigs due to a lack of equipment to dismantle decommissioned platforms.

Minister of Energy is in a hurry building new offshore wind turbines Industry trade body Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) has warned of the risks of leaving the oil and gas sector without heavy lift ships and the cranes needed to lift platforms.

OEUK’s Ricky Thomson warned in his annual report on decommissioning that there was a “direct conflict” between the two countries. demands for oil field closure and the introduction of wind energy.

He predicted matters would come to a head by 2028, when a record number of rigs would be removed as turbine installation climbs to unprecedented levels.

According to OEUK’s estimates, there are currently only four or five ships in the world capable of lifting the largest platforms out of the water.

The largest is the 1,250-foot-long, double-hulled Pioneering Spirit; It is the largest ship of any type floating and has a lifting capacity of 50,000 tonnes.

OEUK estimates the UK will need to decommission around 2,000 wells over the next decade; the rate is 200 per year, which is well above what was previously achieved.

Costs from decommissioning will account for 33 percent of all oil and gas spending by 2030; then these costs will exceed the industry’s capital expenditures and investment expenditures.

The crunch will be exacerbated by the Government’s decision in the Budget to increase an unexpected tax on oil industry profits to 38 per cent – a move OEUK said would result in many more operators deciding to stop production.

Mr Thomson said plans to reduce North Sea production also threatened to deprive the industry of the ability to finance clean-up efforts.

Ashley Kelty, head of oil and gas research at Panmure Gordon, said he expected the unexpectedly high tax to lead to increased demand for dismantling platforms, forcing firms to limit production.

“I don’t think the government has any idea how tax changes and other policies to close the North Sea will affect demand for decommissioning,” he said.

“They will put pressure on wind farms to add as much capacity as possible, but they haven’t realized that the oil industry needs the same equipment.

“This is a huge problem. “There will be abandoned platforms that will bring environmental problems with platforms left unattended.”

Apart from the risk of decaying infrastructure polluting the ocean, Mr Kelty said the imbalance of demand and supply would prompt specialist shipowners to increase their prices, which would force wind energy companies to demand higher subsidies and raise energy bills.

European wind energy operators will also struggle to secure enough capacity to meet their target of installing 160 gigawatts of turbine capacity by 2030 due to competition from Asia, he said.

OEUK said there were particular concerns about the North Sea, where many platforms have reached the end of their operating life.

The water here is much deeper than in the south, making it difficult to remove unused rigs and infrastructure; oil fields are far from the nearest deep water ports.

UK firms also face ship competition from drilling for decommissioning and potentially carbon capture and storage in the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Mr Thomson said one solution could be to create a fleet of barges to carry out the dismantling without the need to transport the rigs to the quayside.

He warned that it was vital Labor did not reduce North Sea production so much that companies could not fund the shut-ins and subsequent clean-up work; this is estimated to cost more than £2bn a year, including the removal of 90,000 tonnes of subsea. The structures of the next decade.

“We need to make sure that we have a stable landscape on the political side of things for production to happen as we move out of service to pay for this,” he said.

“The mixture should be even. “We just have to make sure we don’t drive costs through the roof.”

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