Heerema Consortium Wins 120,000-Tonne UK North Sea Removal Work
Three platforms will come out in a multi-year campaign and go ashore at AF Environmental Base Vats in Norway
Heerema Marine Contractors, working in consortium with AF Offshore Decom, has been awarded three contracts by a North Sea operator for the engineering, preparation, removal and disposal of three platforms in the UK sector. The structures have a combined weight of more than 120,000 tonnes.
The platforms will be taken out in a multi-year offshore campaign using Heerema's heavy-lift fleet, then transported to AF Environmental Base Vats in Norway for onshore dismantling, recycling and disposal. The consortium expects the projects to be completed within the next decade.
Neither the operator nor the individual platforms have been identified. The tonnage figure alone puts the package among the larger removal scopes let in the UK sector, and a three-platform award of that size effectively books a substantial block of heavy-lift capacity for years rather than seasons.
The pairing is not new. Heerema and AF Offshore Decom have taken earlier UK North Sea removal awards together during 2026, building a repeat structure in which the Dutch contractor handles the lift and marine transport and the Norwegian partner takes the structures apart onshore at Vats. Cradle-to-grave packages of that kind have become the preferred procurement model for operators trying to fix cost and liability in a single contract rather than tendering removal and disposal separately.
The UK decommissioning market has been building toward this scale for several years as first-generation infrastructure in the central and northern North Sea reaches the end of production. The constraint has generally been vessel availability rather than demand, since only a handful of contractors can lift topsides and jackets in the weight classes involved.
For the wider offshore supply chain, a multi-year campaign of this size supports a steady load of preparation work, tow support and yard capacity across the period, and it removes a further tranche of ageing structures from the UK continental shelf.
