|
An asset that has been in service for a number of years will eventually reaches the end of its useful life either because it is no longer economic to continue using and maintaining it, technological changes have made it obsolete or it has some feature (or lack of a feature) that makes it no longer safe or otherwise desirable to operate it. The decommissioning and disposal phase follows the useful operate and maintain phase/s of the assets life. The expected useful life of an asset can vary from one to two years for high stress applications (or disposable assets such as office computers) to many decades or even centuries for some major assets such as bridges, buildings, paper machines etc.
Between these extremes, manufacturing and process plants can have expected lives of forty to sixty years at which time their scale, cost effectiveness or technological limitations render them no longer viable and a new, or significantly upgraded plant is required. A significant responsibility of the Asset Management group is to correctly identify the best rebuild/replace points and to effectively plan and implement these decisions to minimise the whole of life costs and minimise any disruption to operations.
The decision to decommission and dispose an existing asset gives rise to the need to manage this phase of the assets life safely and effectively to minimise the total cost to the organisation while still meeting all safety and environmental regulations. Safe disposal of redundant assets has become an area of increasing concern in recent years and decommissioning and disposing of assets when they have reached the end of their useful life can incur significant cost and require adherence to restrictive regulations. The main area of concern to the regulators up to now has been how best to allow an organisation to dispose of an asset while minimising the environmental and safety risks associated with the disposal phase.
The economic, safety and environmental issues surrounding the retirement of an asset must be considered in detail and a clear plan developed to manage the decommissioning and disposal phase. The nature of the asset will in most cases determine the relative importance and difficulty of the tasks involved and should be laid out in a detailed plan showing timing, resources, risks, risk mitigation and costs.
The decommissioning and disposal phase can be a significant project in its own right and must be treated as such. It is not uncommon for those involved in the initial construction project to ignore the likely costs associated with decommissioning and disposal, leaving the organisation with a significant un-funded liability for the future. The project may well have been considered uneconomic at the outset if all the true costs had been identified and accounted for. Asset with significantly long life expectancies such as bridges, oil rigs etc. can have much higher decommissioning and disposal costs than might have been initially appreciated. Some of these costs may arise from changes to safety and environmental regulations and make decommissioning and disposal of these and similar assets much more costly.
Some of the important steps in the decommissioning and disposal phase planning are as follows.
-
Identification of the need to retire the asset.
-
Initial scoping of the project tasks involved in decommissioning and disposal.
-
Research of any relevant regulations that must be followed during the decommissioning and disposal phase.
-
Assess the safety and environmental risks associated with all stages of the decommissioning and disposal project.
-
Assess the financial costs associated with the decommissioning and disposal project.
-
Develop a detailed project plan for the decommissioning and disposal project.
-
Provide all documentation and supervisory systems demanded under any relevant regulations.
|
