The North Sea Transition Authority has fined EnQuest Heather Limited a collective £16.5 million after concluding that the operator failed to decommission 33 inactive wells across the Alma, Galia, Broom, and Dons fields. The penalty covers four licences, with each breach fined at £500,000, and follows what the regulator described as prolonged non-compliance after production ceased between summer 2020 and spring 2021.
The action goes beyond a financial penalty. In its sanction notice, the NSTA said the company must complete plugging and abandonment work on the affected well origins and associated wellbores within five years of the notice. The regulator said repeated extensions had been granted, only for further deadlines to be missed, and said its investigation found a deliberate strategy to defer plugging and abandonment costs after the wells had already reached the end of their useful life.
That matters well beyond a single operator. Well plugging and abandonment accounts for almost half of expected North Sea decommissioning spend, and the NSTA has said the sector is on course to spend around £27 billion between 2023 and 2032. It has also warned that delays push up eventual costs, increase the chance of supply chain capability drifting overseas, and can leave the Exchequer more exposed because decommissioning costs remain tax-deductible.
Stuart Payne, chief executive of the NSTA, said safe and timely decommissioning is “an essential part of doing business in the North Sea”, adding that delays risk adding costs for taxpayers and undermining the steady workflow needed by specialist contractors. The timing is significant. The regulator says around 500 wells are already at or beyond deadline, with more than 1,000 additional wells expected to fall due for decommissioning between 2026 and 2030, turning what might once have looked like a licence-by-licence compliance issue into a basin-wide test of execution.
