The Pacific OCS: 23 platforms, complete removal, and nothing finished yet

The Gulf of Mexico has 806 standing structures inside non-completed campaigns. The Pacific OCS has 23 platforms in total.

That ratio is why the Pacific is usually ignored in decommissioning market analysis, and why ignoring it is a mistake. The Pacific is not a smaller version of the Gulf. It is a different market with a different removal policy, a different structure mix, a different cost basis and a different set of constraints — and it is the place where several questions the Gulf has not had to answer are being answered first.

We looked at Mexico’s offshore decommissioning market as a large liability with a slow start. The Pacific is a small liability with an even slower one.

The inventory

Twenty-three California OCS oil and gas platforms, installed between the late 1960s and the 1990s, are subject to eventual decommissioning.

Eight of those facilities are in various stages of decommissioning, installed between 1967 and 1987. The progress to date:

Facility	Wells abandoned	Conductors removed	Status
Harvest, Hidalgo, Hermosa	46	62	Completed (wells and conductors)
Grace	28	38	Completed (wells and conductors)
Gail	28	28	Completed (wells and conductors)
Habitat	20 shut-in wells	—	Abandonment began mid-to-late 2025
Hogan, Houchin	21 orphaned sidetrack wells	—	Awaiting appeal decision

That totals 102 wells abandoned and 128 conductors removed across five platforms.

And yet the headline fact remains: no platform on the Pacific OCS has been fully decommissioned. Wells have been plugged. Conductors have come out. The structures are still standing.

Five platforms have finished their well and conductor work. Zero platforms have finished decommissioning. The gap between those two sentences is the Pacific market.

Complete removal is the decision

This is the single most important policy difference from the Gulf.

The Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was published in the Federal Register on 27 October 2023, and a Record of Decision followed in December 2023. The Final PEIS recommended the alternative of complete removal of all oil and gas equipment and facilities on the Pacific OCS.

Compare that to the Gulf, where reefing in place is an established route, with several hundred approvals since 1987, and where pipelines are frequently decommissioned in place under §250.1750.

A complete-removal baseline changes the scope profile fundamentally:

• No toppling option as the default. The jacket comes out, which means heavy lift, transport and shore disposal for every structure.
• Deeper water, heavier structures. Several California platforms sit in water depths that make their jackets among the largest removal objects in US waters.
• West Coast logistics. Yard capacity, heavy-lift vessel availability and disposal routing on the Pacific coast are thinner than the Gulf Coast equivalent, which has four decades of accumulated infrastructure.
• A different permitting environment. State, coastal and environmental review in California adds process that a Gulf shelf removal does not carry.

For a contractor, complete removal means the Pacific’s 23 structures represent more removal tonnage per structure than a comparable Gulf count, concentrated in a market with less local supply chain.

Hogan, Houchin and the $10 million lesson

The most instructive detail in the Pacific record is also the smallest.

Platforms Hogan and Houchin carry 21 orphaned sidetrack wells. They are being manned, monitored and maintained under an arrangement involving the regulator, the Department’s solicitors and three predecessor lessees, while an administrative appeal is pending before the Interior Board of Land Appeals.

The regulator estimates an approximately $10 million deficit in financial assurance to decommission those 21 wells.

Twenty-one wells. Ten million dollars short. Two platforms held in a maintenance state while an appeal runs.

Every element of the Gulf’s structural problem is present in that paragraph at a scale small enough to see clearly:

1. Orphaned infrastructure. The current lessee cannot or will not perform.
2. Predecessor liability. Prior owners are drawn in — the mechanism we traced in predecessor liability after a Gulf bankruptcy.
3. A funding gap. Posted assurance is less than estimated cost, the pattern behind the whole financial assurance debate.
4. Litigation as delay. An appeal converts a decommissioning obligation into a holding cost.
5. Care and maintenance as a scope. Manning, monitoring and maintaining non-producing platforms is itself contracted work, indefinitely.

GAO specifically identified long-standing regulatory uncertainty about Pacific end-of-lease scenarios as a factor complicating enforcement, and recommended that Interior finalise regulatory updates clarifying decommissioning criteria and deadlines for idle infrastructure nationwide and for Pacific end-of-lease situations. That recommendation was marked a priority.

What the Pacific offers a service company

Honestly assessed, it is a hard market to enter and a valuable one to understand.

Why it is hard. Twenty-three structures is not a volume business. Mobilising a heavy-lift spread to the West Coast for one or two jobs is expensive. Permitting timelines are long. Work has stalled before — the record shows well and conductor work completed years before structure removal, with no structure removal yet delivered.

Why it matters anyway.

• Care and maintenance is live work now. Platforms held pending appeal still need manning, monitoring, inspection and integrity management. That is contracted, recurring and uncontested by the usual competitors.
• Well abandonment is proceeding. Habitat began abandonment of 20 shut-in wells in 2025. Wells are being plugged even where structures are frozen.
• The removal backlog is accumulating, not shrinking. Twenty-three structures with a complete-removal decision and zero completions is a pipeline that must eventually clear.
• Cost benchmarks are published. The regulator has commissioned Pacific-specific decommissioning cost studies, partly to inform bonding decisions. That is unusually transparent reference material for a market this small.
• The regional office is co-located. Secretary’s Order 3451 notes the Pacific regional operations in Camarillo, California — now under the Marine Minerals Administration rather than two separate bureaus.

How to read the Pacific without overclaiming

Four cautions, because this is a market where small numbers invite large statements.

Twenty-three is the universe, not the pipeline. Most of those platforms are not in a pre-execution window. Applying the sales window logic to the Pacific would reduce 23 to a very small number of genuinely active opportunities.

Progress is phase-specific. “Completed” for Harvest, Hidalgo, Hermosa, Grace and Gail means wells and conductors. It does not mean the platform is gone. Reporting it as completed decommissioning would be wrong.

Federal is not the whole story. California also has platforms in state waters under state jurisdiction, with separate rules and separate processes. A Pacific market view that mixes the two will mis-state both.

Dates move. A Record of Decision is a policy commitment, not a schedule. Appeals, funding gaps and permitting can and have deferred execution.

The useful comparison

The Gulf’s problem is volume: thousands of wells, hundreds of structures, a long overdue tail, and a supply chain large enough to work through it. The Pacific’s problem is the opposite: too few projects to sustain a local supply chain, structures too large to remove casually, and a complete-removal standard that forbids the cheap option.

Both problems produce the same symptom — work that is legally due and commercially stalled. The Pacific just shows it in a sample small enough to read end to end.

For a contractor already serving the Gulf, the Pacific is best treated as a watchlist with two live scopes — care and maintenance, and well abandonment — and one large deferred scope in structure removal. Knowing which is which for a specific facility is the kind of question a one-off Opportunity Brief is built to answer.

Sources

• Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Pacific Region Federal OCS Decommissioning — facility-by-facility status, wells abandoned, conductors removed, the Habitat and Hogan/Houchin positions, and the approximately $10 million financial assurance deficit.
• Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, BSEE Issues California Offshore Energy Infrastructure Decommissioning Decision — the Record of Decision.
• Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Pacific Oil and Gas Decommissioning Activities.
• U.S. Government Accountability Office, Offshore Oil and Gas: Interior Needs to Improve Decommissioning Enforcement and Mitigate Related Risks, GAO-24-106229, January 2024 — Pacific end-of-lease regulatory uncertainty and the priority recommendation.
• Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Decommissioning Cost Update for Pacific OCS Region Facilities, Volume 1, Technology Assessment Program — benchmark costs for Pacific OCS facilities, prepared partly to inform supplemental bonding decisions.
• U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary's Order No. 3451, 10 July 2026 — regional office co-location.