The Oil & Gas Authority (OGA) has today (19 July 2019) launched an updated set of stewardship expectations, to promote industry good practice and support maximum economic recovery (MER).
The ten stewardship expectations have been designed to apply across the entire exploration and production lifecycle, and have been developed jointly with industry.
Two of the expectations are new: Well activity performance and Commercial alignment and delivery. The first promotes successful delivery of well activity throughout the lifecycle using systematic deployment of existing practices and learning during planning and execution phases.
The second, Commercial alignment and delivery, promotes the adoption and implementation of existing good commercial practices to enable activity to progress in a manner and pace consistent with licensees’ obligations in the MER UK strategy.
“The OGA’s asset stewardship strategy was published in 2016 and stewardship expectations bring added focus and emphasis to our ambition for MER UK,” says Gunther Newcombe, Operations Director at the OGA.
“The updated stewardship expectations will put the industry on the best footing to further stimulate upstream activity, maintain and support performance improvements while continuing to maintain high standards of safety and environmental management.”
“As Co-Chair of the Asset Stewardship Taskforce and industry sponsor for the revised stewardship expectations, I welcome these enhanced expectations in setting a new benchmark for industry,” said Jon Graham, Managing Director of Apache North Sea.
“These stewardship expectations have evolved to create more clarity, and provide ‘guidance with teeth’, and do much to support delivery of the MER strategy.”
The OGA plans to champion these revised stewardship expectations with a six-month intensive engagement programme in the second half of 2019 using events, operator visits and meetings.