Marine Scotland offshore renewables decommissioning guidance: consultation

We agree with the approach taken to stay close to the UK guidance. However, the wish to stay close to UK wide guidance and to avoid the risk of costs to tax payers due to poorly articulated decommissioning programmes are incompatible, unless both the UK and Scottish guidance are improved significantly. We provide recommendations to achieve this in our answer to question 7.

We recommend that the Scottish Government takes the UK wide guidance as a starting point, and then significantly improve it. The proposed regular revisions will be useful moments for this.

We also note that the Scottish Government may not need to worry about maintaining close alignment with UK wide guidance out of concern regarding business development in offshore renewables in Scotland when compared to the rest of the UK. Plans for offshore renewables growth are hugely ambitious. When we look into offshore wind for example, then the formal UK targets are to realise 75GW by 2050 but informally the ambition goes much further to 175GW. That is only possible if we maximise opportunities everywhere in the UK.

While the risks to miss out on business development opportunities appears low in the light of the said ambitions, the risks associated with poorly articulated decommissioning programmes under the UK guidance is very real.

A review of offshore wind decommissioning plans by our team at the University of Leeds revealed that the current guidance for the whole of the UK has resulted in very poor quality decommissioning plans. The Scottish Government should not join a race to the bottom and instead would do better to make sure to deliver against their own priorities in their National Performance Framework: To value and enjoy the built and natural environment, and enhance it for future generations; And realise the full economic potential with better jobs.

Moreover, in the draft guidance we read “…a proper regard for safety, the environment, other legitimate uses of the sea and economic considerations”; and “The proposed guidance would make it clear to developers and other stakeholders what is expected of them when producing a decommissioning programme…”, “…help to ensure that Scottish Ministers have enough information (…) robust checks for the Finance and Constitution Committee”, “…professional approach to risk management”, and “Decommissioning programmes should set out the extent of infrastructure to be removed, methods and processes. They should include a base case of all infrastructure being removed, alongside any alternatives that the operator proposes, backed up by evidence and reasoning for the preferred option”. If we assume that the guidance has been more or less copied from the guidance provided by BEIS for the whole of the UK, then we can conclude that the guidance is unlikely to achieve any of these aspirations based on the general state of current decommissioning programmes that are publically available. This is particularly visible in the generally underdeveloped and un-costed plans for waste management. We will offer further details of our findings under the most relevant sections of your consultation.

Marine Scotland can contact us directly for a copy of our review of the decommissioning plans.

What provisions will the Scottish Government take to improve the quality of the decommissioning plans for offshore renewables?

To fully answer this question more information is required on how Marine Scotland would assess/facilitate the differing agreements that BEIS allow test site and tenants to hold in respect of agreement on decommissioning responsibility and securities (i.e. which differ from those accepted by BEIS for non-test sites). In principle, however, the proposed approach is agreeable assuming it does not stunt innovation by smaller operators. That is to say, caution has to be exercised around anything that would limit smaller operators’ ability to test their OREI innovations, i.e. are smaller entities able to suitably take on any extra potential burden that Marine Scotland could demand in respect of plans and securities that a test centre would perhaps not deem necessary. Overall, taking the decision solely away from the Test Centre and passing appraisal of plans over to a third-party, in this case Marine Scotland, is sensible. This is, however, based on the assumption that the overall content of decommissioning programmes is improved. Whether it is a test centre or Marine Scotland undertaking the review, the currently allowed/requested content of decommissioning plans provides little assurance over the end-of-life management of OREIs or an operators’ ability to meet the costs involved. Assuming that the content of programmes is improved, it would perhaps be more sensible for Marine Scotland to confer with the given centre and come to mutual agreements on the decommissioning of tenant OREI innovations, thus allowing a more informed decision to be made on something that goes beyond either parties’ immediate remits or longer-term objectives with the deployment of OREIs.

We have concerns regarding the financial securities due to our research results suggesting a significant underestimate of decommissioning costs to the tune of 400-1000%. Marine Scotland is welcome to contact our team to discuss the details supporting our claim.

Given the likely underestimate of decommissioning costs, we recommend that a high optimism bias is applied to all calculations.

We also note considerable challenges in calculating the cost estimates. In 8.3 we read “Costs should be calculated according to present day methods and technologies and should not include any learning rate assumptions. (Developers/owners may propose to modify the programme at a later date where methods and expected costs have changed over time).” However, our engagement with industry, government, and research and innovation bodies suggests that methods and technologies, and indeed the equipment and port and resource management infrastructure, may not be available to decommission, remove and sustainably process all offshore renewable infrastructure. This is recognised in the guidance itself under Section 7, where it is assumed that methods and technologies may not be available yet. This means that parts of the end of use process will continue to remain uncosted, as is the case generally for the resource “waste” management. This is part of the reason for the significant underestimates in costings.

We finally note that the requested cost structure is not in line with general waste management regulations, and certainly not with the Circular Economy Bill, by ignoring solutions such as designing out wastes – i.e. design for durability, reuse, repair, repurposing, disassembly and remanufacturing – and instead asks only for costings on removal, recycling and waste management. This must be adapted, and we provide further suggestions on this subject under questions 5 and 7.

As with question 3.

The timings are too short and should be expanded to allow a feedback loop on the design of offshore renewable energy infrastructure. This ties into our response to question 7, which will detail that offshore renewable energy infrastructure should be designed from a circular economy perspective in order to minimise environmental, social and economic impacts and maximise the benefits. The current proposed timelines are unlikely to enable significant changes to the design of offshore renewable energy infrastructure as many critical decisions will have been made already and contracts for manufacturing and development are likely to be in place.

On a practical level, given the time between commissioning and repowering and/or decommissioning, the production of detailed decommissioning programmes (DP) is difficult. However, this does not mean that developers should not be able to provide an assurance that they understand what will be needed to effectively undertake decommissioning of an installation in a financially and, most importantly for a low-carbon technology, environmentally sound manner.

Reviews of existing offshore wind (OSW) DPs have been recently undertaken by academics and industry consultants, largely in respect of the cost of decommissioning. Notably, each of these reviews has highlighted their lack of detail and the perfunctory nature of their content. Publically available OSW DPs, as they currently stand, provide nothing more than a promise by the operator that they will remove the installed infrastructure (albeit abandoning export cables) and will manage the removed materials in accordance with the Waste Hierarchy, with high-level references to steel being easily recycled and blades being “sustainably incinerated”. Though this essentially satisfies the demands of the Energy Act, it does not give any assurance that an operator has any understanding whatsoever of what technologies are indeed available at the necessary industrial scales required to recover, reuse or indeed recycle the materials of offshore wind in accordance with the Waste Hierarchy or otherwise.

Broad brush statements indicating an intention adopt the BPEO of the day (i.e. 20 – 30 years in the future) is not acceptable within a responsible economy that is seeking to promote greater resource efficiency/productivity within circular material usage systems. For example, from a logistics and technological perspective, the capacity to sustainably manage the levels of blade waste that will increasingly require disposal does not currently exist. Moreover, despite the widespread move toward permanent magnet driven turbines, which rely on critical (rare earth) materials that are used within a variety of personal and low-carbon technologies, not one of the publically available DPs either acknowledge the use of such critical materials or indeed how they will be recovered/recycled (something that does currently not occur on an industrial scale). DPs, as a minimum, should show some acknowledgement of the current scarcity of the infrastructure (including recovery vessels) required to undertake decommissioning, the current capacity and limitations of the ‘waste’ management technologies they are expecting to adopt, the impact of these current limitations, and their personal efforts, or awareness of other efforts, to address these limitations.

Not acknowledging potential issues at the point of commissioning leaves offshore renewable infrastructures open to the same mistakes of, for example, the oil and gas industry who developed and deployed their infrastructure in a manner where the tax payer has been left to manage substantial parts of the financial and environmental impacts of their decommissioning and clean-up. In-depth detail on waste management is not needed or suitable at the point of commissioning, but an acknowledgement and appreciation of what operators are proposing in respect of their current limitations to their proposals, is. Some elements of this information exist within an installation’s EIA and the respect technologies EPD/LCA; as such, there is no excuse for not using or referring to such information within DPs.

In principle the provision of a template is very useful. The current template appears largely copied from the North Sea oil & gas industry. While it is commendable to make every effort to learn from the North Sea oil & gas sector, the context for oil & gas infrastructure is entirely different than for offshore renewable energy infrastructure (OREI). Therefore we propose substantial changes to the template to ensure ‘decommissioning’ plans for OREI are meaningful and of a valuable quality.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NORTH SEA OIL & GAS AND OREI:
Given the scale of the ambition for marine renewables it seems unlikely that any installations would be fully decommissioned at end of use. It can be expected that close to 100% of all projects will apply for exceptions because of continued exploitation of renewable wind and water resources. This paints an entirely different context for decommissioning plans when compared to North Sea Oil & Gas, where installations will likely be decommissioned in full within the next 20-25 years. It can be anticipated that entire sites for OREI will be used again for the same purpose, and that offers greater opportunity for circular economy solutions.

Our research evidence suggests that the North Sea Oil & Gas sector is poorly aligned with circular economy values that would enable greater reuse, repair, repurposing and remanufacturing with recycling, energy from waste and landfill as last resorts. Reuse of equipment and components in the oil & gas sector, for example, is dramatically low at ca 1% while it could be much higher. A part of the reason why reuse is at such a low rate is lack of planning ahead to remove equipment for reuse prior to decommissioning and the very poor material inventory data. Oil & gas infrastructure was often put into place with poor record keeping of materials used. For OREI there is no reason to copy such practice, especially with the availability of digital solutions for materials tracking it is now possible to maintain high standards and provide more precise material inventories for OREI. Each installation should include a bill of materials i.e. how much iron, copper, composite, REE, fluids is in each turbine and how will each be recovered. In short, we cannot rely on guidance and expertise from the oil & gas sector to translate directly to OREI.

The template for decommissioning programmes for OREI should reflect the greater chance and opportunity for circular economy approaches, including the repowering and reuse of sites for OREI, power lines to land, substations, and array cables, and reuse, repair, repurposing and remanufacturing potential of OREI components and equipment before they are classed as a waste when decommissioning commences. Steps 12-14 in the currently proposed template are likely to be of less direct relevance to current OREI sites, but they should nevertheless be covered albeit in the context of a very likely reuse of the site for extended existing/ new OREI developments.
Such a change in approach is important, because it can lower costs to government, developers and operators, and improve environmental performance. For example, given the OREI growth ambitions developers could bring required cabling and foundations for wind turbines in place now to last for 2-3 rounds of OREI. This is already common practice in the Netherlands where the current generation of smaller wind turbines can easily be upgraded to the larger turbines that will become the industry standard in 2025-2027 when repowering operations may be carried out at scale. Such foresight has to be designed into renewables developments and the associated ‘decommissioning’ plans, and would require edits of the proposed guidance in for example section 5.37.

WASTE HIERARCHY:
The waste hierarchy is not fully implemented in the guidance. Waste prevention is fully out of scope. Moreover, while the polluter pays principle is articulated well in the guidance, there is no mention of extended producer responsibility or resource stewardship.

Reuse is downplayed in the guidance for no obvious reason. “We do not expect the default position in the decommissioning programme submitted at the start of the project to be that infrastructure will be re-used. Scottish Ministers would not be able to re-use infrastructure in the event that decommissioning fell to the Scottish Ministers, and to date it has not been common practice to re-use infrastructure after a project ends” we read under point 8.8. While North Sea oil & gas infrastructure was commissioned in a chaotic manner in a knee-jerk response to acute energy security issues in the 1970s, there is no such reason for OREI. We now have the ability to design infrastructure for e.g. reuse, repair, repurposing and remanufacturing. Excluding this possibility is not in line with the UK and Scottish climate change, resource productivity and circular economy strategies and policies, and indeed out of tune with other parts of the OREI decommissioning guidance stating that “7.16 Waste from decommissioning should be reused, recycled or incinerated with energy recovery in line with the waste hierarchy, with disposal on land as the last option”.

Given the early stages in which OREI decommissioning is, there is no ‘default’ yet as the guidance appears to imply. OREI decommissioning is all entirely new and this offers the opportunity to get things right. So why would the Scottish Government want to put in place such a restrictive guideline? In North Sea oil & gas decommissioning the reuse rate is 1% at best and this is highly unsustainable. In presumably more sustainable industries such as renewables we ought to do significantly better. For offshore wind turbines, recycling may cost energy to the amount that carbon emission savings build up over the lifetime of a wind turbine are largely destroyed. To ensure OREI are sustainable, it is necessary to adopt more circular economy approaches as outlined above and the decommissioning guidance is an opportunity to encourage industry to do so. In that regard, in point 5.25 a line could be added to make it obligatory to also consider new circular economy solutions.

MAKE DEVELOPMENT OF DECOMMISSIONING EXPERTISE EXPLICIT AND OBLIGATORY:
The guidance anticipates development of best practice and techniques to decommission OREI, but does not put any obligations on developers and operators to invest in this. This is a recipe for disaster. If methods are not available at the point of commissioning, then a plan should be presented to develop such solutions over the lifetime of the infrastructure to ensure that solutions are available at end of use – preferably circular economy solutions that are sustainable. Operators should outline solutions currently available, and define the knowledge gap, and propose how missing expertise will be generated (e.g. under point 7.3).

SYSTEM BOUNDARIES - CONSULTAITON PROCESS:
The system boundaries have been drawn very narrowly around the offshore renewables power generation facilities & other users of the sea. This excludes other key actors such as:
- Supply chain companies
- Raw material suppliers, who will be critical in ensuring supplies for the components required to meet renewables growth ambitions
- Environmental NGOs here and in locations where materials for renewables are sourced. The latter will be directly affected if decommissioning here does not properly take care of recovering equipment, components and materials.
- Local communities in Scotland
- Resources sector dealing with the wastes from renewables infrastructure
- New emerging sectors such as O&M, digital services and remanufacturing

This consultation should reach our wider to ensure that decommissioning programmes are fully integrated in a whole system approach for a circular economy.

We also recommend to change the minimum of 30 days for consultation to a minimum of 20 working days.

SYSTEM BOUNDARIES - ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS AND BENEFITS:
The narrow system boundaries around OREI installations only also pertains to the EIA, which does not take the wider system into account. For example, poor waste management practices in the UK could result in higher demand for natural resource exploitation elsewhere. The aim of the BPEO is to find the solution that is “the option which provides the most benefit or least damage to the environment as a whole, at an acceptable cost, in both the long and short term. (In essence, the choice made should involve balancing the reduction in environmental risk with the practicability and cost of reducing the risk)” but based on the narrow boundaries set out, it will not be possible to optimise from a whole system perspective. For example, if we consider sea bed clearance then, from the perspective of environment and resource management, there is little benefit to take concrete foundations out. Converse to cables which – unless they continue to be used for a new OREI development – would perhaps be better recovered because of the high volume of critical materials that are in them, and that would have to be sourced anew from environmentally and socially vulnerable areas otherwise. We suggest to significantly broaden the system boundaries to enable optimisation at a whole system level, and this is detailed further under question 10.

We note that performance for the environment ought to go above compliance with the Energy Act and waste regulations alone (5.27), and aim to enhance the environment as set out in the Scottish National Performance Framework and UK and Scottish government strategies – soon to be enshrined in law.

We also note that in North Sea oil & gas the EIA and comparative assessment are provided as separate documents. In practice this results in a limited integration of environmental and technical aspects, because there tends to be a limited communication between the environmental teams and the engineering teams for example. As a result it could be that equipment that still has useful life left in them is thrown away in the decommissioning process, and at the same time the equipment is bought anew for operations by the same company. We plead for a more effective integration of the EIA and comparative assessment directly into the decommissioning programme.

There is no right answer to this question. How much life is left in the array and wider wind farm would play a part in any decision. There are examples of the leading edge of blades deteriorating much sooner than expected and replacement being necessary to maintain the effectiveness of the installation, both from energy and financial return perspectives. As highlighted in the response to Q.6, the availability of vessels and current waste management capacity and solutions would be crucial to this decision. Any failures in the near future should arguably be replaced for simple long-term installation yield perspectives. However, if current material management technologies remain as is, there is an argument that mid to longer term failures should stay in-situ until the balance of installation plant will be repowered or decommissioned as this would allow (hopefully) for more sustainable BPEO to be developed – which, with some concern, seems to be what the industry is assuming will happen and/or hoping for.

N/A - we are not a business.

INSIGHT INTO SCALE, NATURE, EXTENT AND TIMESCALES OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS:
The Strategic Environment Assessment argues that there is insufficient insight into scale, nature, extent and timescales of future developments to analyse impacts of decommissioning. While we acknowledge the uncertainties, we also believe that efforts can be made to estimate the scale and scope of the challenges, opportunities, impacts and benefits. Our team at the University of Leeds, for example, has calculated the volumes of materials currently deployed and permitted to be commissioning in the near future for offshore wind, and this offers a basis to provide such estimates. This would help to government and industry to plan for decommissioning. We would be happy to discuss our initial headline results with Marine Scotland, and to gauge the possibilities also with respect to the next point:

SYSTEM BOUNDARIES - OPTIMISE ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC COSTS AND BENEFITS:
The guidance is based within marine navigation and energy legislation, but lacks a grounding in resources and sustainability. The decommissioning programme should include evidence on how the offshore renewable energy infrastructure has been designed to optimise the economic, social, technical and environmental values at every stage of the infrastructure’s lifecycle including the end of use. This will require a feedback to the design of the offshore renewable energy infrastructure itself, and not just to the decommissioning programme. This should be added into the processes outlined in Chapter 5 and in the Flowchart in Annex B. This statement, in 5.5, is too non-committal “An indication of the decommissioning proposals should be included as part of the statutory consenting or licensing process so that the feasibility of removing the infrastructure can be assessed as part of the application process” and has to be strengthened. [Covered in Q 5] And this means that the timelines indicated in point 5.6, “Scottish Ministers expect that final drafts of decommissioning programmes should be submitted for approval no later than 6 months in advance of construction, and that the first drafts should be submitted about 18 months in advance”, will have to be longer in advance to include the design phase of the offshore renewable energy infrastructure.

ONE-STOP-SHOP BALANCED WITH WHOLE SYSTEM EXPERTISE
Having a one-stop-shop is a considerable improvement compared to North Sea Oil & Gas decommissioning: (5.2) “the aim is, as far as possible, for Scottish Ministers to provide a “one stop shop” in relation to decommissioning”, and would surely be supported by the findings of the Decommissioning Regulatory Hub. We do note however that this places a huge responsibility on Marine Scotland, and requiring expertise that may not traditionally have been within the remit of Marine Scotland itself. We therefor recommend to carry out an analysis of expertise and capacity required, and to prepare a plan to supplement any capacity gaps should they be present in Marine Scotland.