The human cost of late life operations

Across the North Sea today, thousands of people are working on facilities they know will soon disappear. The end may still be several years away, but the direction is clear. Production declines. Investment tightens. Conversations about decommissioning begin quietly in the background.

The North Sea is one of the world’s most mature offshore regions, so the realities of late life operations are particularly visible here. But the same pattern is now emerging across ageing assets globally, from the Gulf of Mexico to Southeast Asia and parts of the Middle East.

Technically, the industry has become very good at managing ageing infrastructure. Operators know how to extend production, maintain integrity and plan for eventual decommissioning.

What receives far less attention is the human reality of those final years. Because when the workforce can see the end coming, behaviour begins to change.

Late life assets operate in a very different psychological environment from growth assets. When a facility has decades of production ahead of it, investment flows, careers develop and teams see long-term stability. Engagement and safety culture benefit from that shared confidence in the future.

Late life operations are different. The workforce understands when production is declining. People hear the conversations about portfolio reduction and decommissioning plans. Even if closure is several years away, the trajectory is obvious.

At that point individuals start asking a different set of questions. What happens next? How long will my role exist? Where do I go when this asset closes?

None of these questions are unreasonable. But collectively they begin to change how people think about the work in front of them. Maintaining focus and engagement becomes harder precisely at the moment when ageing facilities often require greater operational vigilance, not less.

The second challenge, attrition, follows soon after. Once experienced personnel believe an asset has a limited future, many begin exploring their next opportunity long before the official end-of-life timeline. The result is a pattern many operators will recognise. The most experienced people often leave first.

They move to assets with longer production horizons, join new projects elsewhere in the industry, or transition into different sectors entirely. Their replacements may be capable professionals, but they arrive without the years of operational familiarity built up on that specific facility. Gradually the depth of experience within the team begins to thin. As assets move closer to the end of their producing life, that erosion can become increasingly pronounced.

Operational knowledge rarely exists only in documentation. It lives in people. Technicians who understand how a platform behaves under unusual conditions. Engineers who know which equipment responds differently than the design assumptions suggest. Supervisors who have seen the facility operate through years of operational challenges. This knowledge accumulates slowly over decades, and it often disappears quietly when individuals leave.

By the time formal decommissioning activity begins, organisations may already have lost a significant portion of the operational memory that once sustained the asset.

Ironically, this is exactly when that knowledge becomes most valuable. Late life operations and decommissioning are not separate chapters. The people running the facility are already preparing it for its final phase, whether intentionally or not, and when that continuity disappears, inefficiencies and risks inevitably follow.

Large workforce reductions linked to asset closures rarely stay inside the organisation. They reach local communities, industry publications and sometimes national headlines, all factors that shape public perception

At a time when the energy industry already operates under intense scrutiny, poorly managed workforce transitions can reinforce narratives of decline and abandonment. For leadership teams, the final years of an asset represent more than an operational challenge, they become a reputational one as well.

However, none of these pressures appear suddenly. They develop gradually over several years as assets move through late life and toward eventual decommissioning. This knowledge offers a golden opportunity to manage these assets ‘deliberately’.

The operators navigating late life most successfully are those that recognise the human dimension early. They treat workforce stability, knowledge retention and safety culture as central elements of their late life strategy rather than unintended side effects.

Increasingly, operators are also looking for partners who can move beyond purely advisory roles and support the operational reality of late life assets, helping manage both the technical and workforce challenges that emerge in the final years.

This often means thinking about late life operations and decommissioning as part of the same journey. When the teams operating the asset are also preparing it for decommissioning, knowledge is preserved. Safety culture remains stable. And the transition into the final phase becomes far more controlled. Put simply, the people who understand the asset best are still there when the most critical decisions are made.

Many organisations are also exploring ways to maintain workforce continuity across portfolios and even across regions, allowing experienced personnel to move between assets and projects rather than leaving the industry altogether.

The challenges of late life operations are often framed in technical or financial terms. But increasingly, the real challenge is human.

Safety performance, operational efficiency and successful decommissioning all depend on the same factor: the experience and engagement of the people running the asset.

When that workforce loses confidence in its future, the risks begin long before the first well is plugged or the first piece of equipment is removed.

The organisations recognising this early are already adapting their approach, looking at new ways to maintain workforce continuity, retain critical knowledge and support people through the transition. Because in late life operations, protecting the workforce ultimately means protecting the asset itself.

And the companies that understand that truth early will be the ones that manage the final chapter of their assets most successfully.