The Scottish Affairs Committee has met to consider the future of North Sea oil and gas infrastructure, hearing from a decommissioning expert that any reuse of oil platforms for renewables would face “substantial challenges”.
In the 13 November hearing, Richard Neilson of the School of Engineering, Aberdeen University, and the National Decommissioning Centre, told the committee that transporting renewable electricity back across distances as great as 150km would not be viable. He also said that oil platforms would only hold space for one or two wind turbines, offering far less capacity than most offshore wind farms.
On the subject of carbon capture and storage, Graeme Fergusson, Managing Director at decommissioning firm Decom Energy, said that the distance to send captured carbon to be stored would cause difficulties and several platforms will still be using their pipelines for oil transportation for several more years.
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