Top Ten Research Priorities for Offshore Oil and Gas Decommissioning

A global horizon scan by 35 experts identified the top ten research needs for decommissioning offshore oil and gas structures. The dataset, from the NESP MaC 1.19 project, contains 257 collated research questions categorized into five disciplinary areas. It was published in 2023 by researchers including Sarah Watson.

Use Cases

• Prioritizing research funding based on expert-identified needs for decommissioning impacts.
• Analyzing interdisciplinary research gaps based on categorized questions from science, industry, and policy experts.
• Informing governance frameworks based on priorities like risk thresholds and liability characterization.
• Modeling environmental impacts based on priorities for contaminants, ecosystem services, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Strengths

• Derived from a structured expert elicitation process involving 35 global interdisciplinary experts.
• Collates and categorizes 257 distinct research questions from the expert cohort.
• Expert selection aimed for representation across geographical regions, fields of work, and technical disciplines.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect bias inherent to the expert selection and horizon-scan methodology.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network, associated with the NESP MaC 1.19 project and a 2023 paper by Sarah Watson et al.

Collection Method

Horizon-scan process with expert elicitation from 35 of 65 invited global experts.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 13:43:22.865930; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global