Decommissioning Environment Management Plan

Every industrial asset eventually stops producing. Refineries, process plants, power stations, offshore platforms, pipelines, terminals and mines all reach a point where continued operation is uneconomic, unsafe or no longer permitted — and at that point the operator inherits a different project entirely. Decommissioning is not the reverse of construction. It is carried out on an asset whose contents, condition and contamination history are only partly known, under regulatory regimes that require the site to be surrendered in a defined state, and in front of stakeholders who want to know exactly what will be left behind.

This course builds the environmental competence needed to plan and deliver that work. It begins with the drivers, objectives and scope of decommissioning projects and the role of the Decommissioning Environment Management Plan (DEMP) as the controlling document. It then works through the statutory framework — NEPA, CERCLA and RCRA in the United States, alongside the international marine regime, the UK Petroleum Act arrangements and Gulf regional environmental law — before moving into site characterisation, hazardous materials surveys, sampling and analysis, stakeholder engagement, decommissioning and demolition methods, live environmental monitoring during the works, and the waste management routes that determine whether a project recovers its materials or simply landfills them.

Throughout, the emphasis is on method and evidence: how a conceptual site model is built, how a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey differs from a management survey, how TCLP results decide a disposal route, how the ABC method sets a noise limit, and how a pre-demolition audit turns a structure into a materials inventory. The result is a practitioner who can write a DEMP that a regulator will accept and a contractor can actually work to.

What you will learn

• Define the objectives, scope and life-cycle phases of a decommissioning project and explain the role of the DEMP within it.
• Apply the core United States statutes — NEPA, CERCLA and RCRA — and the international marine decommissioning regime to a specific asset, and sequence the approvals, closure permits and consents it needs.
• Design a site characterisation programme built on a conceptual site model, data quality objectives and a defensible sampling, analytical and quality-control design, and screen the results against risk-based criteria.
• Specify and interpret a hazardous materials survey covering asbestos, PCBs, ozone-depleting substances, NORM, lead and mercury.
• Plan and run stakeholder engagement across regulators, workforce, communities and marine users, including a working grievance mechanism.
• Compare isolation, decontamination, demolition and offshore removal methods on environmental, waste and safety grounds.
• Set up dust, noise, vibration and water monitoring with defensible trigger and action levels, and the controls that keep the works inside them.
• Classify decommissioning wastes and route them correctly through reuse, recycling, recovery, treatment and disposal.

Who it is for

The course is written for environmental advisers, HSE managers, decommissioning and project engineers, demolition and dismantling contractors, regulators and consenting officers, consultants preparing decommissioning programmes and closure plans, and asset managers responsible for end-of-life liabilities. It suits both onshore process and industrial sites and offshore oil and gas assets. No prior decommissioning experience is assumed, but a working familiarity with industrial operations or environmental management will help you get the most from the technical detail.

How the course works

Study is entirely self-paced and online. Each lesson is a structured written module with tables, worked criteria and practical checkpoints, and can be revisited as often as you wish. The course concludes with a 30-question final exam with a pass mark of 70 per cent; on passing, you receive a verifiable SKEDMIA certificate. Allow approximately 7 to 8 hours of study in total.