A few years ago we wrote about how legacy hardcopy data – wellfiles, seismic sections, basemaps, paper folios accumulated through decades of mergers, license rounds and farm-ins – had a quiet habit of becoming unfindable. At the time, the phrase “I wish I could put my hands on that report” was, for most operators, an inconvenience. Today, for operators preparing to decommission, it is a growing regulatory and financial headache.
Three things have changed since we last looked at this.
The work has changed
The North Sea, and basins like it, are firmly in a decommissioning phase. The NSTA’s Decommissioning Glidepath has formalised what most operators already knew: you cannot plan, cost or execute a credible decommissioning programme without trusted information on what is in the well, on the seabed and on the platform. The OEUK 2024 Decommissioning Report put hard numbers behind that pressure – cost per platform well is up by a quarter since 2021, and cost per exploration and appraisal well is up by more than half. Every gap in the record now carries a price tag, and every box of paper sitting in offsite storage is potentially a contingency line in someone’s AFE.
That has shifted attitudes. Hardcopy data is no longer a tidy-up job that can be picked up between projects. For decommissioning teams, it sits squarely on the critical path.
The technology has, mostly, caught up
The optimistic story is that tooling around legacy content has genuinely improved. OCR on poor-quality scans is significantly better than it was a few years ago. Modern intelligent search can read across SharePoint, OpenText LiveLink and physical archive systems together, rather than treating them as separate worlds. Energy-specific taxonomies and knowledge graphs mean a search for “Brent” can disambiguate the field from the group from the unit, and a search for “P&A” returns the documents an engineer would actually have meant by it. AI-assisted tagging has taken a lot of the dull, error-prone work out of cataloguing.
The less optimistic story is that general-purpose AI has not, on its own, fixed any of this. Large language models pointed at a messy SharePoint will confidently retrieve the wrong document with the wrong context, which in a decommissioning setting is often worse than retrieving nothing. The technology that has actually helped is the technology built around grounding: curated taxonomies, controlled metadata and retrieval pipelines that understand what a wellfile is and what its parts are called.
And some technology has, frankly, hindered. Aggressive cloud migrations have occasionally left hardcopy indexes stranded on legacy systems no one wants to log into. Storage providers’ catalogues – often the only meaningful index of what is actually in a warehouse – have remained outside whatever new search portal the IT team rolled out. The result is that an engineer can search beautifully across the digital estate while remaining functionally blind to a large slice of what the company owns.
Decommissioning is expensive. Cost per platform well is up by a quarter since 2021. Cost per E&A well is up by over a half*.
Increased Cost
Platform vs Exploration & Appraisal — 2021 to 2024
Bringing hardcopy back into the same search
This is the gap the Sirus Platform was designed to close. Sirus reads the indexes of multiple hardcopy storage systems – including providers such as eSearch – and brings them alongside SharePoint, LiveLink and other electronic stores in a single search experience. From the user’s perspective there is one search box; behind it, electronic documents and physical box- or item-level listings are treated as part of the same corpus, classified against the same energy taxonomy, and surfaced together.
In a decommissioning context that matters in very practical ways. A planner asking “what do we have on the cement bond log for well X?” finds the digital report, the scanned tally and the box number that holds the original log – in one query. Scanning priorities become evidence-based: instead of digitising warehouses on principle, teams can target the boxes that actually contain documents needed for the NSTA submission, the contractor pack or a long-term retention obligation. And nothing important sits invisible just because it happens to be on paper. That has shifted attitudes. Hardcopy data is no longer a tidy-up job that can be picked up between projects. For decommissioning teams, it sits squarely on the critical path.
Where to start
If your decommissioning programme is approaching, or already underway, two questions are worth asking now rather than later:
Neither problem is exotic, and neither has to be solved in a single heroic project. But both get more expensive the closer they sit to a decommissioning milestone.
If you would like to talk through how Sirus, and our data managers, can help bring your hardcopy estate into the same view as everything else, we would be glad to hear from you.
