Oil major Shell is taking Woodside and Paladin Resources to court over the bill for the decommissioning of the Nothern Endeavour FPSO. Shell was forced to pay assessment notices issued by the Australian Taxation Office in 2023 and 2024 totalling AUD86.5m ($57.5m) in February 2024 concerning the clean-up bill for the Northern Endeavour. The major claimed in a writ lodged in the Western Australia Supreme Court that it had a clause in a share purchase deal which it signed with Woodside and Paladin more than a decade ago, making the two companies liable. The oil major is demanding that the court order full reimbursement of the costs from both Woodside and Paladin as well as compensation of all future costs that may stem from the decommissioning which is only in the first of three stages. The FPSO worked on the Laminaria and Corallina fields in the Timor Sea over 500 km off Darwin. The original three stakeholders in the field were Woodside as the majority owner and operator, Shell, and BHP. Woodside and Paladin bought Shell’s stake in the field before handing the FPSO to Northern Oil and Gas Australia (NOGA) in 2016. The FPSO was shut down in 2019 after safety warnings from NOPSEMA but there was a hitch. NOGA collapsed just months later with an AUD$200m decommissioning bill which still needed to be covered. The only thing that remained was for the government of Australia to pay for the clean-up of the vessel by itself as NOGA and its subsidiaries were AUD$164m in debt. Australia did legislate a levy on the oil and gas industry in 2022 to recover the cost of decommissioning the Northern Endeavour FPSO. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1_95_0_1_2'); }); TagsAustralia