Strategic decision-making in offshore oil and gas platform-to-wind turbine conversion: An integrated analysis of structural integrity into retrofit lifecycle costs and climate change impacts

Abstract

The conversion of offshore oil and gas platforms into offshore wind turbines presents a viable and complex solution for extending the lifecycle of existing infrastructures at their decommissioning stage while contributing to renewable energy production. However, the retrofit process involved in conversion projects poses significant challenges for decision-makers in resource allocation and strategic planning. These challenges mainly lie in balancing the structural feasibility and economic viability of retrofit processes with their environmental sustainability. This study proposes an analytical decision-making framework that integrates structural integrity assessment into the retrofit life cycle cost and its associated climate change impact analyses. Utilizing a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process methodology, the study evaluates the impact of structural integrity criteria of the integrated existing infrastructure-offshore wind turbine on key retrofit cost components and its climate change implications. This framework provides insights into how variations in structural integrity directly influence the distribution of life cycle cost main contributors in retrofit process and its climate change impact across various life cycle stages. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to examine retrofit cost distributions and environmental effects across different structural safety threshold scenarios, providing strategic insights into sustainable resource allocation and strategic planning optimization in offshore platform conversion projects.