A new report from Fortune Business Insights on the global offshore decommissioning market forecasts that the North America decommissioning market will grow at a CAGR of 7.06% from 2026 to 2034, the highest rate regionally after Europe.
The North America offshore decommissioning market size stood at around US$2.26bn in 2025, accounting for roughly 26.49% of the global market size, valued at US$8.52bn in 2025, according to the report. The region contains over 14,000 inactive offshore wells and more than 2,000 decommissioned platforms, creating a continuous pipeline of abandonment work. Many shallow-water platforms installed in the 1970s–1990s are at the end of their life, while deepwater fields sanctioned in the early 2000s are now entering late-life phases.
Offshore decommissioning is driven mainly by ageing assets, regulatory enforcement, and the economic reprioritisation of offshore portfolios, the report notes. Large energy companies are exiting marginal offshore fields to reallocate capital toward higher-return assets, including LNG, deepwater hubs, and low-carbon investments.
The report highlights the shift from multi-vendor execution toward integrated single-contract (EPC-style) decommissioning models, enableing operators to lock in costs early, transfer execution risk, and simplify regulatory compliance through a single accountable entity. Contractors with combined capabilities, including heavy-lift removal, subsea services, well P&A coordination, and access to certified recycling yards, are gaining a competitive advantage.
Challenges
Challenges for offshore decommissioning include the high capital intensity combined with cost uncertainty, which continues to delay project sanctioning despite regulatory pressure. Decommissioning expenditures require substantial upfront capital for well plugging and abandonment, heavy-lift vessel mobilisation, subsea clearance, and onshore dismantling. For operators managing multiple late-life assets, these costs compete directly with sustaining capital expenditures (capex) and balance-sheet priorities, often leading to phased or deferred execution rather than complete removal.
One of the most critical challenges is execution complexity arising from legacy infrastructure and incomplete historical data, with many offshore fields scheduled for decommissioning developed before standardised digital asset management and modern integrity documentation came into use. This lack of reliable data increases the risk of encountering unknown well conditions, undocumented tie-ins, or degraded materials during execution.
Offshore decommissioning presents significant opportunities driven by project aggregation, specialisation, and industrialisation of removal activities rather than one-off asset retirement, the report notes. As decommissioning volumes rise sharply in mature basins, operators are increasingly bundling multiple platforms, wells, and subsea assets into multi-field or basin-wide decommissioning programmes. This creates opportunities for contractors to secure long-term framework agreements, enabling fleet optimisation, repeatable execution, and margin stability through scale efficiencies.
Another key opportunity lies in late-life asset transfer and decommissioning-only operators. The report notes that financial investors and specialist firms are acquiring end-of-life offshore assets specifically to execute decommissioning at lower cost through lean operating models and optimised contracting strategies, opening the market for advisory, engineering, and execution partners with specialised decommissioning expertise rather than traditional exploration and production (E&P) capabilities.
