Safe Decommissioning for High-Hazard Operations
Control risk, protect your workforce, and exit operations as safely as you ran them.
Safe Decommissioning for High-Hazard Operations
Control risk, protect your workforce, and exit operations as safely as you ran them.
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Decommissioning Without Compromise: Controlling Risk in the Industry’s Most Complex Phase
End of life doesn’t mean end of risk
When an asset reaches the end of its productive life, the safety challenge doesn’t disappear; it often intensifies. Decommissioning is one of the most hazardous stages in the oil and gas lifecycle, combining unfamiliar tasks, constantly changing conditions, and a workforce dominated by contractors. It’s a phase where traditional controls are necessary but not sufficient and where behavioural safety, human performance, and leadership become decisive.
At DEKRA, we help safety, EHS, and operations leaders navigate this critical stage with confidence, reducing exposure, strengthening workforce behaviours, and ensuring your organisation exits operations as safely as it ran them.
The Decommissioning Safety Paradox
Decommissioning is often perceived as a “wind-down” of risk. In reality, the opposite is true.
Systems that were once stable are dismantled under conditions they were never designed for. Temporary utilities replace permanent ones. Hazards from residual hydrocarbons to structural instability can emerge unpredictably. And workforces are often made up of contractors with limited knowledge of site history or safety culture.
The result? A convergence of risk factors that makes this stage one of the most complex and high-stakes in the industry.
- 86–90% of incidents during decommissioning involve contractors.
- 78% of fatalities occur among non-company personnel.
- Organisational process failures from poor change management to weak supervision are present in more than 80% of incidents.
Why Traditional Safety Approaches Fall Short
Organisational process failures from poor change management to weak supervision are present in more than 80% of incidents
Standard operating procedures, engineering safeguards, and compliance programmes remain essential — but they do not address the most common causes of serious injury and fatality in the decommissioning environment.
Behavioural and organisational factors dominate incident causation. Common challenges include:
- Overreliance on contractors: Teams with little site knowledge or hazard familiarity are tasked with carrying out high-risk work.
- Rapid change: Temporary systems, one-off tasks, and evolving interfaces create continual uncertainty.
- Complacency: Once production stops, risk perception drops even though latent hazards remain.
- Cultural drift: Deviations become normalised, communication weakens, and oversight gaps widen.
- Competency gaps: Decommissioning tasks such as heavy lifting, breaking containment, and complex dismantling require skills beyond those used in routine operations.
These are not technical problems — they are human and organisational ones. And solving them requires a different type of safety strategy.
How DEKRA Helps you Decommission with Confidence
DEKRA brings decades of experience helping high-hazard industries reduce exposure and embed safety as an operational advantage. Our approach goes beyond compliance to address the human, organisational, and cultural dynamics that drive outcomes during late-life asset management.
We support your decommissioning strategy through proven, science-based solutions that transform safety performance:
- Preventing Injury: A comprehensive framework for identifying, prioritising, and controlling exposures that lead to serious injuries and fatalities.
- Supervisor Development: Building leadership capability to make better risk-based decisions and intervene effectively in dynamic environments.
- Addressing Human Error and Risk Blind Spots: Workers often fail to recognise critical hazards or underestimate how their decisions contribute to risk — especially in dynamic, high-consequence environments. Integrating neuroscience-based safety directly tackles these cognitive gaps by improving risk perception, situational awareness, and decision-making across the workforce.
- Aligning Safety Culture Across Complex Teams: Multi-contractor environments often operate with inconsistent expectations, conflicting priorities, and weak communication — increasing the likelihood of incidents. By creating shared safety ownership, improving communication, and enabling leaders to have high impact conversations, organisations can drive safer outcomes.
As Operations End, Risk Doesn’t.
Decommissioning isn’t the end of your safety journey — it’s one of its most critical chapters. As complexity increases and exposure multiplies, the organisations that succeed will be those that treat safety not as a compliance requirement, but as a leadership mandate.
DEKRA partners with you to make decommissioning safer, smarter, and more predictable — turning potential risk into an opportunity for operational excellence.
Let’s Talk About Your Decommissioning Strategy
Get in touch with our team to discuss how DEKRA can help you reduce exposure, strengthen workforce behaviours, and embed safety into every stage of your decommissioning programme.