2038 seemed forever away when we were patching for y2k, now it's not so far (and I'm old).

Yes and we can fit a wide variety of tooling to cover pretty much any task. We also have specialist saturation divers onboard who can work down to 200m water depth which covers most of the North sea (it's shallower than people think).

Bit of both, I don't have any involvement in the finance side but i believe there's some kind of government fund to do with decommissioning work as well as from the operator.

It would eventually rust to pieces I guess (and leak). They do last a long time (we've worked on some that were installed in the 1970's) they use cathodic protection to help with corrosion but it would get them eventually. They're plugged, cemented, cut and pulled. Takes a while for each one.

Not ours, but it's a better picture than I have to hand. Typical ROV used with a pair of robot arms. About the size of a mid sized car for scale.

Yes, although a lot of the assets (wells) aren't directly below the rigs. They can be spread out for miles around and tied back via pipeline. It all has to come out so it's going to take a fair while (should see out my career anyway!) Everything has to be completely removed.

Launched overboard from a ship, we're decommissioning oil and gas assets in the North Sea mostly (I'm out there right now). I do still get to pilot now and then although mostly supervise now.

Yeah and it's amazing I never seem to be on shift for that one! We just do it here, no extra and no half and half split between shifts.

I'm on 6/6 nights and had to do the 13 hour shift last week over here, somewhat bitter about it, mostly because I'm always on it and never seem to get the other side of the deal heh.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide.

Watch out for the statues...