Aberdeen should set itself one very big ambition.

Become the best decommissioning centre in the world.

Not simply the UK centre.

The world centre.

For fifty years Aberdeen built an extraordinary concentration of offshore engineering expertise around producing oil and gas from one of the world’s most difficult environments.

Now another enormous engineering challenge is emerging.

Taking it apart safely.

North Sea decommissioning expenditure reached a record £2.6 billion in 2025 and is forecast to peak at around £3.3 billion in 2027.

Around 500 wells are already beyond their original decommissioning deadlines.

Another 1,000 are expected to stop producing over the next five years.

That means an enormous amount of P&A, well intervention, subsea, marine, heavy lift, engineering and project work is coming.

Aberdeen should capture as much of it as possible.

But that shouldn’t be the ambition.

The ambition should be to use the North Sea as the training ground for building a world leading decommissioning industry.

Because Britain isn’t the only country with ageing oil and gas infrastructure.

The Gulf of Mexico has thousands of wells and offshore structures.

Australia faces a substantial offshore decommissioning programme.

Southeast Asia has hundreds of ageing offshore fields.