Insights
Decommissioning offshore wind is an integration problem, not a capability one
The sector can already remove a turbine. What it lacks is one party willing to own the interfaces, the risk and the cost across the whole end-of-life scope, the same single-party model that works in construction, extended to the end of the asset’s life.
A recurring theme at Global Offshore Wind 2026 was end of life. The first generation of offshore wind farms is no longer a future concern, across Europe, decisions about life extension, repowering and removal are becoming live commercial realities. One delivery-side speaker put it plainly: decommissioning is not, at heart, an engineering-capability problem. The capability already exists. What the sector lacks is integration, one party prepared to pull contractors, ports, marine operators, regulators and recyclers into a single, accountable delivery model.
We agree with that diagnosis. It is also the model MintMech is built on. So rather than restate the problem, it is worth setting out what integrated, single-party delivery actually looks like in practice, because “integration” is easy to call for and hard to own.
The hard part is commercial, not technical
Removing a monopile, a jacket, an array cable or a substation topside is, individually, well-understood work. The difficulty is not any single scope, it is the seams between them. Decommissioning a site is an ecosystem of connected assets and obligations: foundations, cables, scour protection, blades and other composites, marine spreads, waste streams and environmental conditions, each with its own contractor, its own method statement and its own commercial terms.
Risk and cost escape through the gaps between those scopes. When a campaign is let as a stack of separate packages, every interface becomes a negotiation, every handover a place for programme and budget to slip and the developer is left holding the coordination and the residual risk no one else would price. That is the real problem GOW26 was circling. It is a problem of ownership: of interfaces, of risk and of certainty around cost.
What “integration” actually means
Integration is not a procurement preference; it is an accountability structure. It means one organisation takes the scope end to end and answers for the result, so the interfaces sit inside one company’s responsibility rather than between several.
That is how MintMech is set up. We design in-house. We manage fabrication through a specialist supplier network, shipyards, fabrication yards, NDT, inspection and coatings, selected and controlled for the job in hand. We then assemble, integrate and commission the result in-house at our facility in Penryn and support it offshore. The fabrication is outsourced; the accountability is not. One party owns the chain from drawing board to commissioned, delivered equipment.
Outsourcing fabrication to specialists is a strength, not a gap. It lets us match each part of the build to the right yard while keeping design intent, interface control and final integration under one roof, the points where end-of-life campaigns usually come unstuck. The customer gets a single point of responsibility instead of a coordination job handed back to them.
Where the risk and interfaces sit
In a single-party model, the awkward questions have a clear owner before work starts: who guarantees that the cutting tool, the lifting method and the foundation as-built fit together; who carries the weather-window and vessel-availability risk; who owns the waste and recovery route once a component is on deck. Under fragmented delivery these fall between contracts. Under single-party delivery they are priced, owned and engineered as one problem.
This is the same discipline that earns repeat work in construction and equipment delivery, every client we have built for has come back with a second order and there is no reason end of life should be the one phase the industry leaves disaggregated.
Designing for removal changes the engineering
The deeper point the GOW26 discussion gestured at is that end of life is a design consideration, not a late one. The choices made when an asset is installed largely determine how hard, expensive and wasteful it is to remove decades later. An industry that plans for the end as carefully as it plans for the beginning designs for recovery from the outset: how a foundation will be severed and lifted, how value is recovered.
That last point matters more than it first appears. The first generation of offshore wind was installed with the vessels and economics of its day, lighter spreads than the fleets installing today’s XXL monopiles. Removing those early foundations by mobilising a modern heavy-lift campaign is rarely the economic answer. The engineering challenge is to recover an ageing asset with a method sized to that asset, not to the current installation fleet.
That thinking is why we are developing a pile-extraction concept that cuts and jacks a redundant foundation out of the seabed and recovers it without a heavy-lift spread, combining proven MintMech equipment with a single integrated cutting tool, under one accountable method. It is a concept in development, not an off-the-shelf system; but it is a concrete example of designing the removal around the asset, which is exactly the shift the sector says it needs.
The opportunity
Decommissioning offshore wind is not a question of whether the industry can remove what it has built, of course it can. The question is whether anyone will own the whole of it: the interfaces, the risk, the cost and the recovery, from one accountable seat. That is the model we already deliver in construction and equipment, and it is the one end of life needs. An industry comes of age when it plans for the end as carefully as it plans for the beginning, and when it can name the party responsible for getting there.