Subsea and offshore asset integrity management — inspection regimes, fabric maintenance scheduling, and structural monitoring — is generally strong on fields operated to international majors’ internal standards, and considerably more variable on marginal or late-life fields where operating budgets are tighter and oversight less consistent.
We would argue for a regulatory floor that applies a single integrity management standard (aligned with recognised international codes such as DNV’s asset integrity guidance) across all producing fields in a jurisdiction, regardless of operator size or field maturity, with inspection results reported to the regulator on a fixed schedule rather than only on request. Treating integrity management as a licence condition rather than an optional operator programme would close the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced operators, and would give host governments an early warning system for the kind of deferred-maintenance risk that is expensive, and sometimes catastrophic, to discover late.
This is a directive we’d like to see modelled first at a single-field pilot scale before being proposed more broadly — regulation that outruns the capacity to enforce it tends to do more harm than the gap it was meant to close.