Can we pump carbon back beneath the North Sea?

Few people have ever seen them, except perhaps from a plane. Yet these huge, remote structures have stood planted in the North Sea, buffeted for decades by wind and wave, pumping cash into the UK economy. They are the hundreds of oil and gas platforms which churn out the equivalent of 2.8 million barrels of oil per day. But there is a strong likelihood that the North Sea will within a generation return to the unbroken grey expanse of the mid-1960s, when the first offshore rig struck gas. If the government’s predictions are accurate, most of the rigs will have tumbled by 2035.

Approximately 470 installations are to be decommissioned, including up to 14,000km of pipelines, 15 onshore terminals and around 5,000 wells. Sad though this may be for oil managers and rig workers, it is good news for one group of entrepreneurs — the decommissioning crews who will dismantle the kit and the companies that will treat and sell the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of scrap metal brought ashore.

Able UK on Teesside, the company that controversially accepted a contract to break up toxic US naval ‘ghost’ ships in 2003, has been one of the first to step forward. A year ago it set to work on the first scrap steel brought in from the largest oil platform toppled so far, a 38,000 tonne structure that originally stood in the North West Hutton field, northeast of the Shetlands. Owned by BP, this huge platform, installed in 1981 and productive until 2003, was one and a quarter times the height of the Gherkin building in the City of London. The portion above the surface — known as topsides — was demolished last year, while most of the undersea legs, known as the jacket, were pulled out this summer. The next platforms to come down after North West Hutton are likely to be Indefatigable, off the Norfolk coast, and Miller, a BP field 270km northeast of Aberdeen.