The basins that built Australia are ageing.
The North West Shelf began producing in the 1980s. Bass Strait goes back further still. These were the assets that made Australia an energy nation, and they have given decades of service. They are also, unmistakably, old.
Ageing infrastructure changes everything about the work. Integrity management becomes a daily discipline. Production tails off and the economics tighten. And eventually the question shifts from how to keep producing to how to stop responsibly. LUVI sees a clear structural rise in late life and decommissioning scopes across both regions, and that rise is only beginning.
Decommissioning is not a single event. It is a long programme of well plug and abandonment, subsea infrastructure removal, pipeline management and facility disposal that can run for years per asset. Australia has hundreds of wells and thousands of kilometres of pipeline that will move through this cycle.
The regulator is forcing the timeline.
For a long time decommissioning was something operators could push to the right. That window is closing. NOPSEMA, the national offshore regulator, has sharpened its expectations on decommissioning planning, financial assurance and trailing liability, and the lesson of high profile abandoned assets is fresh in everyone's mind.
The result is that decommissioning has moved from a distant obligation to an active programme of work with real budgets and real schedules. Operators now need credible plans, credible cost estimates and credible people to deliver them.
This regulatory push is the single biggest driver of demand that LUVI observes in this space. It converts a slow demographic trend into firm hiring. When a regulator sets a clock, the recruitment follows quickly, and the disciplines involved are precisely the ones the market has under invested in for years.
A specialist workforce steps forward.
Decommissioning and late life work demand a distinctive skill set, and the people who hold it are in short supply.
- Subsea engineers. Removing what was installed decades ago is often harder than installing it. Subsea engineering talent that understands both legacy hardware and modern removal methods is highly sought.
- Plug and abandonment specialists. Permanently sealing wells is exacting, regulated work. Wells engineers with genuine P and A experience are among the scarcest roles we recruit.
- Marine and ROV. Remotely operated vehicle pilots, technicians and marine specialists underpin every offshore removal campaign, and the same people are wanted by the renewables and survey sectors.
- Late life operations. Running an asset gracefully into retirement needs operators and integrity engineers comfortable with declining, higher risk facilities.
Demand for these roles competes directly with new build LNG, which means candidates with the right background can choose their market.
The workforce that straddles build and removal.
Here is the tension that defines Australian offshore careers right now. The same disciplines are wanted at both ends of the asset lifecycle. Subsea, marine, wells and project controls talent can choose between building the next backfill development or removing the last generation of infrastructure.
That is unusual and valuable. A subsea engineer is no longer locked into a declining niche. They can move between Scarborough class new build and Bass Strait class removal, and the breadth makes them more resilient than a single discipline specialist from the greenfield era.
For employers it raises the stakes. Decommissioning rarely carries the prestige of a flagship project, so it must compete on other terms: clear scope, fair reward and the honest pitch that this work is technically demanding and professionally durable. The operators who frame decommissioning as a career, not a consolation, will win the talent.
LUVI works across both ends of this lifecycle. We help clients build teams that can deliver new gas and retire old infrastructure, often drawing on the same pool of people. As the basins age, that dual capability stops being a nice to have and becomes the core of a credible workforce strategy.